Socioeconomic Status, Culture, and Reading Comprehension in Immigrant Students

Research on reading comprehension in immigrant students is heterogeneous and conflicting. Differences in socioeconomic status and cultural origins are very likely confounds in determining whether differences to native pupils can be attributed to immigrant status. We collected data on 312 Spanish students of Native, of Hispanic origin–therefore with the same family language as native students- and Non-Hispanic origin, while controlling for socioeconomic status, non-verbal reasoning and school membership. We measured reading comprehension, knowledge of syntax, sentence comprehension monitoring, and vocabulary. Differences among groups appeared only in vocabulary and syntax (with poorer performance in the non-Hispanic group), with no differences in reading comprehension. However, regression analyses showed that most of the variability in reading comprehension was predicted by age, socioeconomic status, non-verbal reasoning, and comprehension monitoring. Group membership did not significantly contribute to explain reading comprehension variability. The present study supports the idea that socioeconomically disadvantaged students, both native and immigrants from diverse cultural backgrounds, irrespective of the language of origin, are probably equally at risk of poor reading comprehension.

Transfer from Spatial Education to Verbal Reasoning and Prediction of Transfer from Classroom-Based Neural Change

Assessing whether learning in one domain is transferable to abilities in other domains often eludes traditional testing. Thus, a question with bearing on the promise of neuroscience for education is whether neural changes that accompany in-school curriculum learning can improve prediction of learning transfer. Separately, debate in philosophy and psychology has long concerned whether spatial processes underlie seemingly nonspatial/verbal human reasoning (e.g., mental model theory; MMT). If so, education that fosters spatial cognition might yield transfer to improved verbal reasoning. Here, in real-world classrooms studied in a quasi-experimental design, a STEM curriculum devised to foster spatial cognition yielded improved spatial abilities and-consistent with MMT-transferred beyond the spatial domain to improved verbal reasoning. Further supporting MMT, the more students’ spatial ability improved, the more their verbal reasoning improved, and spatial ability improvement mediated curriculum transfer. At the neural level, longitudinal fMRI detected curriculum-driven changes in activity, connectivity, and representational similarity of brain regions implicated in spatial cognition. Critically, changes in spatial cognition-linked neural activity robustly predicted curriculum transfer-more accurately than testing and grades-and mediated this transfer. Reports by the National Research Council and others note that spatial abilities reliably predict STEM achievement, but that broad adoption of spatial cognition-focused curricula depends on classroom-based evidence of efficacy and mechanisms-of-change. The present findings support the real-world application of MMT to classrooms via “spatial education.” Further, demonstrating that in-school neural change can predict transfer over-and-above performance-based assessment suggests the long-term achievability of neurally-informed curriculum development that leverages neural change to identify and design transferable curricula.

Reasoning and Argumentation

The psychology of reasoning and argumentation studies how people reason and persuade others using language. Influenced by analytic philosophy, much early work focused on the degree to which verbal reasoning is captured by or diverges from classical deductive logic. From this viewpoint, human thinking can seem prone to substantial and systematic bias. Since 1994, verbal reasoning has been set in the context of uncertain, common-sense reasoning rather than deduction, and reasoning has been seen as continuous with the social challenge of real-world argumentation. From this perspective, the human ability to reason and argue with words is better considered not as flawed logical reasoning, but as often highly competent reasoning and persuasion in an uncertain and contested world.

Predictive Value of GRE Scores and First-Time Pass Rate on the NBCOT® Exam at a Hispanic-Serving Institution

Date Presented Accepted for AOTA INSPIRE 2021 but unable to be presented due to online event limitations. This presentation provides OT practitioners working in the academic setting with an overview of the admissions process used by an OT program and the importance of criteria for admissions, primarily the Verbal Reasoning section of the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE). A binary logistic regression was used to analyze the data to determine whether the GRE was a significant predictor of a first-time pass rate on the National Board for Certification in Occupational Therapy (NBCOT) exam. The results were significant (p < .00) for the Verbal Reasoning section. Primary Author and Speaker: Don M. Bradley Additional Authors and Speakers: John Luna Contributing Authors: Roel Garcia

Associations Between 11 Parental Discipline Behaviors and Child Outcomes Across 60 Countries

Objective: To test associations between 11 parental discipline behaviors and child aggression, distraction, and prosocial peer relations across low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Study Design: Data came from the fourth (2009-2013) and fifth (2012-2017) rounds of the UNICEF Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS). Survey responses publicly available as of July 2020 were included. Data were restricted to household respondents with focal children under 5 years. The final analytic sample included 163,345 respondents across 60 LMICs. Data were analyzed using Bayesian multilevel logistic regression. Results: Verbal reasoning (80%) and shouting (66%) were the most common parental discipline behaviors toward young children. Psychological and physical aggression were associated with higher child aggression and distraction. Verbal reasoning was associated with lower aggression (OR = 0.92, 95% CI [0.86, 0.99]) and higher prosocial peer relations (OR = 1.30, 95% CI [1.20, 1.42]). Taking away privileges was associated with higher distraction (OR = 1.09, 95% CI [1.03, 1.15] and lower prosocial peer relations (OR = 0.92, 95% CI [0.87, 0.98]). Giving the child something else to do was associated with higher distraction (OR = 1.06, 95% CI [1.01, 1.12]. Random slopes suggested statistically credible cultural variation in the associations between parenting behaviors and child socio-emotional outcomes.Conclusions: Psychological and physical aggression were disadvantageous for children’s socio-emotional development across countries. Only verbal reasoning was associated with positive child socio-emotional development. Greater emphasis should be dedicated to reducing parental use of psychological and physical aggression across cultural contexts.

Mutualistic coupling of vocabulary and non-verbal reasoning in children with and without language disorder

Mutualism is a developmental theory that posits positive reciprocal relationships between distinct cognitive abilities during development. It predicts that abilities such as language and reasoning will influence each other’s rates of growth. This may explain why children with Language Disorders also tend to have lower than average non-verbal cognitive abilities, as poor language would limit the rate of growth of other cognitive skills. The current study tests whether language and non-verbal reasoning show mutualistic coupling in children with and without language disorder using three waves of data from a longitudinal cohort study that over-sampled children with poor language at school entry (N = 501, 7-13 years). Bivariate Latent Change Score models were used to determine whether early receptive vocabulary predicted change in non-verbal reasoning and vice-versa. Models that included mutualistic coupling parameters between vocabulary and non-verbal reasoning showed superior fit to models without these parameters, replicating previous findings. Specifically, children with higher initial language abilities showed greater improvement in non-verbal ability and vice versa. Multi-group models suggested that coupling between language and non-verbal reasoning was equally strong in children with language disorder and those without. This indicates that language has downstream effects on other cognitive abilities, challenging the existence of selective language impairments. Future intervention studies should test whether improving language skills in children with language disorder has positive impacts on other cognitive abilities (and vice versa), and low non-verbal IQ should not be a barrier to accessing such intervention.

Visuo-spatial mental imagery and geometry skills in school-aged children

The relationships between visuo-spatial abilities and geometry performances in school-aged children were examined. A battery of tests assessing non-verbal reasoning, visuo-spatial mental imagery, and academic achievement in geometry (i.e., geometric knowledge and geometric problem-solving competencies) was presented to 162 8-9.5-year-old pupils attending primary school. After controlling for age, significant associations were found between non-verbal reasoning abilities and knowledge in geometry (r = .31, p = .013) and geometric problem-solving skills (r = .35, p = .005), respectively. Similarly, using age as covariate, mental imagery abilities were significantly related to geometric knowledge (r = -.28, p < .001) and geometric problem-solving skills (r = -.24, p = .002), respectively. Furthermore, pupils with high visuo-spatial mental imagery abilities outperformed their peers with low visuo-spatial competences in the geometry tasks and further visuo-spatial abilities measure computed by their teachers. Finally, male participants showed better geometry skills than females.