BackgroundTwo important influences on students' evaluations of teaching are relationship and professor effects. Relationship effects reflect unique matches between students and professors such that some professors are unusually effective for some students, but not for others. Professor effects reflect inter-rater agreement that some professors are more effective than others, on average across students.AimsWe attempted to forecast students' evaluations of live lectures from brief, video-recorded teaching trailers.SampleParticipants were 145 college students (74% female) enrolled in introductory psychology courses at a public university in the Great Lakes region of the United States.MethodsStudents viewed trailers early in the semester and attended live lectures months later. Because subgroups of students viewed the same professors, statistical analyses could isolate professor and relationship effects.ResultsEvaluations were influenced strongly by relationship and professor effects, and students' evaluations of live lectures could be forecasted from students' evaluations of teaching trailers. That is, we could forecast the individual students who would respond unusually well to a specific professor (relationship effects). We could also forecast which professors elicited better evaluations in live lectures, on average across students (professor effects). Professors who elicited unusually good evaluations in some students also elicited better memory for lectures in those students.ConclusionsIt appears possible to forecast relationship and professor effects on teaching evaluations by presenting brief teaching trailers to students. Thus, it might be possible to develop online recommender systems to help match students and professors so that unusually effective teaching emerges.
The sequential sentence paradigm is a feasible test format with mostly equivalent lists. Future studies using this paradigm may need to consider individual differences in WM to see the full range of effects across different conditions. Possible applications include testing the efficacy of various signal-processing techniques in clinical populations.
Spoken English has a stress-alternating rhythm that is not marked in its orthography. In two experiments, the authors evaluated whether stylistic alterations to print that marked stress pulses fostered the rendering of rhythm (experiment 1) and stress (experiment 2) during silent reading. In experiment 1, silent readers rated the helpfulness of the stylistic alterations appearing in the last line of poems. In experiment 2, silent readers rated the helpfulness of the stylistic alterations appearing in heteronyms embedded in prose. As predicted by linguistic theories, when the stylistic alterations mapped onto the rhythmic pulses of the poems, and the lexically stressed syllables of the heteronyms, silent readers rated these alterations as more helpful compared with the incongruous conditions. In experiment 2, readers' inner voices were more tuned to the prosodic nuances of the first syllable than the second in the bisyllabic heteronyms. This prosodic tuning for the first syllable in a word was likely afforded by the strong tendency for stress to appear word-initially. In addition, the stylistically marked stress was viewed as more helpful in the early half of the sentence, when readers likely recruited more bottom-up processes. In both experiments, prior exposure to poetry was related to a refined prosodic awareness. In experiment 2, exposure to poetry predicted participants' prosody sensitivity, after controlling for the other predictors of academic achievement. The authors' ongoing studies are evaluating whether marking stress explicitly in written English might aid struggling readers and late speakers of English.
Listening to ongoing conversations in challenging situations requires explicit use of cognitive resources to decode and process spoken messages. Traditional speech recognition tests are insensitive measures of this cognitive effort, which may differ greatly between individuals or listening conditions. Furthermore, most dual-task paradigms that have been devised for this purpose generally rely on secondary tasks like reaction time and recall that do not reflect real-world listening demands. A new task was designed to capture changes in both speech recognition and verbal processing across different conditions. Listeners heard two sequential sentences spoken by opposite gender talkers in speech-shaped noise. The primary task was a traditional speech recognition test, in which listeners immediately repeated aloud the second sentence in the pair. The secondary task was designed to engage explicit cognitive processes by requiring listeners to write down the first sentence after holding it in memory while listening to and repeating back the second sentence. Test sentences consisted of lists from the PRESTO test (Gilbert et al. 2013, J. Am. Acad. Audiol. vol. 24, pp. 26–36) that were carefully modified to help ensure list-equivalency. Psychometric results from the revised PRESTO sentence lists and from the new dual-sentence task will be reported.
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