To investigate the efficacy of a cognitive approach applied to problems of motivation, anxiety, and test-wiseness in a group test situation, programmed texts were used to Condition a repertoire of verbal responses relevant to each of these problems. Five sixth grade classes composed of 118 Students total were administered Otis-Lennon Mental Ability Tests in a pretest-posttest design. For the five groups, ANCOVA demonstrated a significant effect on raw scores, but not on IQ. Significant IQ and raw score gains were found for the combination group over the control group. Due to treatment lower IQ level students of the combination group made greater raw score gains than upper IQ level students.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

鍾潔雲. / "2013年9月". / "2013 nian 9 yue". / Thesis (Ed.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2013. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 299-315). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstract in Chinese and English. / Zhong Jieyun.

Idea generation is the essence of design as everyday problem solving. Generating ideas can be a matter of life and death or simply a distraction from our normal existence. The eureka moment also means that sometimes people improvise and repurpose whatever is at hand to solve their own problems. As a consequence, a chair becomes a bookshelf; a shoelace can be used to stop bleeding. Generating alternative uses for common household objects should be facilitated by generating alternative situations in which improvisational design might be needed. One way to encourage as many alternative ideas as possible is to think through heuristics of discovery. A number of directions have emerged concerning what can be used as good design heuristics to trigger creative mindsets. Does "walking away from the problem" or "letting the mind wander" really help generate a greater number of alternative ideas? How might shifting a perspective activate proper associative processing and enhance creative performance? Prior studies in generating novel uses often directed people to focus on objects, situations, and events, or to switch between a different time or space. One plausible method yet to be studied systematically, however, is for participants to think of different roles people can take in a society, such as chef, physician, mechanic, athlete, and so on. This dissertation research sets out to uncover certain creative mindsets and potential design heuristics that promote alternative solutions to problems ordinary people encounter in daily life. The studies conducted for this dissertation particularly focus on two mindset conditions: the mind-wandering group was manipulated to "let things come to your mind" and the human-centric group was manipulated to "think of different roles," both conditions representing widespread beliefs among professional designers about generating ideas. In two online experiments, participants were asked to generate as many alternative uses of common household objects as they could using either the mind- wandering or the human-centric mindsets triggered by different search heuristics. Study 1 had a control group and names of objects. Study 2 presented pictures of objects to half the participants and names of objects to the other half. The dependent variables were the fluency of ideas, the originality of ideas, the diversity of assignable roles and the response time between ideas. Results in both studies support the effectiveness of thinking of different roles in the human-centric mindset condition in increasing the fluency of alternative uses and the originality of ideas. Participants given no particular search strategy frequently reported that they tended to have things come to their minds, but they didn’t differ from the mind- wandering mindset group and were outperformed by those using the human-centric mindset strategy. Furthermore, seeing pictures didn’t necessarily give either mindset group the edge in generating more uses and more original ideas. Presenting the names of objects and providing specific roles with the search heuristics seemed enough to help induce a diversity of roles and hence more alternative uses and more original ideas. Those who let their minds wander did take longer to generate ideas than those using the focused associations of roles. The general findings in the dissertation are consistent with previous research showing that those who generated more ideas were more likely to generate more original ideas and those who persisted in ideation more frequently produced more original uses. On the whole, this dissertation research provides significant evidence for the heuristics of roles as a powerful perspective shifter to enhance everyday design concepts for human scale.

Process control is essential in chemical engineering and has diverse applications in automation, manufacturing, scheduling, etc. In this cross-disciplinary work, we shift the domain focus from the control of machines to the control of multiple intelligent agents. Our goal is to improve the optimization problem-solving process, such as optimal regulation of emerging technologies, in a multi-agent system. Achieving that improvement would have potential value both within and outside the chemical engineering community. This work also illustrates the possibility of applying process systems engineering techniques, especially process control, beyond chemical plants. It is very common to observe crowds of individuals solving similar problems with similar information in a largely independent manner. We argue here that the crowds can become more efficient and robust problem-solvers, by partially following the average opinion. This observation runs counter to the widely accepted claim that the wisdom of crowds deteriorates with social influence. The key difference is that individuals are self-interested and hence will reject feedbacks that do not improve their performance. We propose a multi-agent control-theoretic methodology, soft regulation, to model the collective dynamics and compute the degree of social influence, i.e., the level to which one accepts the population feedback, that optimizes the problem-solving performance. Soft regulation is a modeling language for multi-agent sociotechnical systems. The state-space formulation captures the individual learning process (i.e., open loop dynamics) as well as the influence of the population feedback in a straightforward manner. It can model a diverse set of existing multi-agent dynamics. Through numerical analysis and linear algebra, we attempt to understand the role of feedback in multi-agent collective dynamics, thus achieving multi-agent control in sociotechnical systems. Our analysis through mathematical proofs, simulations, and a human subject experiment suggests that intelligent individuals, solving the same problem (or similar problems), could do much better by adaptively adjusting their decisions towards the population average. We even discover that the crowd of human subjects could self-organize into a near-optimal setting. This discovery suggests a new coordination mechanism for enhancing individual decision-making. Potential applications include mobile health, urban planning, and policymaking.

Effective monitoring and control over one’s thinking, or effective metacognition, is a central component to many cognitive tasks and thus is essential to optimize learning (Metcalfe, 1993; Paul, 1992; Reder, 1987; Reder & Ritter, 1992; Schneider & Lockl, 2002; Simon & Newell, 1971; Willingham, 2007). Many factors impact how strategies are implemented. We know a good deal about the cognitive variables that affect implementation of cognitive strategies, but nothing about personality or motivational traits that contribute to effective metacognitive strategy use. This study aimed to explore and clarify the relationship between personality traits, implicit theories of intelligence (Dweck, 1999) and metacognitive control over study time allocation and subsequent test performance. The independent variables included the personality traits described in the Five Factor model (McCrae & Costa, 1997; Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness) and participants’ implicit theories of intelligence (entity or incremental theory), as well as one between-subjects factor, which was time allotted to study passages, or time pressure (High Time Pressure vs. Low Time Pressure). The dependent variables included test performance and metacognitive strategy used. This study used a study-time allocation paradigm similar to the design used in the Son and Metcalfe (2000) study, where participants first ranked passages based on difficulty and interest, then studied the passages under either high or low time pressure. Participants were tested on their understanding of the material after studying. Participants also completed self-report measures of personality and implicit theories of intelligence. Primary findings revealed that participants high on Conscientiousness allocated more study-time to passages judged as interesting compared to participants who were average or low on Conscientiousness. Additionally, when faced with time constraints, participants who identified with an incremental theory of intelligence were more likely to allocate study-time to passages judged as interesting compared to participants who did not identify with an incremental theory of intelligence. Openness was positively related to test performance, and Extraversion was negatively related to test performance. Lastly, the trait Openness was significantly related to having an incremental theory of intelligence.

The Structure-of-Intellect - Learning Abilities Test (SOI-LA) (Meeker, 1975) has an enthusiastic following in the USA, but is little-known in Australia. It is based on the Structure-of-Intellect model of J P Guilford, and through a series of up to 26 subtests, purports to identify 14 general learning abilities. Forms are designed to cater for students from Kindergarten to adult. In NSW, classroom teachers can have support for students with learning difficulties through the Support Teacher program; this support often falls far short of need, as there is a paucity of time and material resources. There is a need for a tool which can identify areas of both strength and weakness efficiently and suggest effective strategies to cater for the identified weaknesses; the Meeker paradigm is purported to address this need with a diagnostic approach which identifies learning disabilities which underlie and serve to maintain school-based learning difficulties, and prescribes materials and approaches for remediation. This study explores the first part of the Meeker paradigm, the diagnostic approach of the Structure-of-Intellect - Learning Abilities Test. This exploration is undertaken in the context of four rural Support Teachers and their student with learning difficulties from Grades 2-6. Rather than consider questions of the Test's validity, this study was designed to explore the Test's utility in the Support Teacher context, by giving the Support Teachers a working knowledge of the concepts of SOI-LA, and to compare the application of their knowledge with the information about their students' learning disabilities from the Test results. Problems are evident with the Support Teachers' knowledge and understanding of their students' disabilities; whist they felt comfortable about the approach which the Test takes, they felt they did not know their students well enough to make informed judgements about their disabilities. It was apparent from the study that the Support Teachers' understanding of the concepts of the Test was comparatively superficial, despite their impression that they did understand well. Several difficulties with the instrument itself are highlighted by this study; the assumptions underlying the derivation of the general ability scores are questioned, and the suitability of Test Forms for a learning disabled population of this age is open to criticism. The Structure-of-Intellect - Learning Abilities Test may have utility as an instrument for gaining information about a student's disability on an individual basis, and may be best in the hands of the School Counsellor.

A latent variable approach was used to (1) examine the relationship between working memory capacity and fluid intelligence, (2) compare the relationship between fluid intelligence and two measures of working memory capacity (complex span and n-back), (3) identify higher-order personality factors and (4) determine the relationship between higher-order personality factors, working memory capacity and fluid intelligence. Confirmatory factor analysis followed by structural equation modeling described the complex span and n-back as highly correlated yet distinct constructs. Consistent with previous research, both measures correlated highly with fluid intelligence. Four higher-order personality factors best modeled the structure of personality. Moreover, these four factors had differential relationship to cognitive constructs. The current research provides a deeper understanding of the relationship between working memory capacity and fluid intelligence, including discrepancies considering the magnitude of the relationship between two types of working memory measures and fluid intelligence, and finally, the influence of a diverse personality structure on working memory capacity and fluid intelligence. Importantly, the study examined these relationships on a broad scale using multiple tasks at a latent level contributing to better understanding of the nature of working memory capacity - fluid intelligence relationship and the influence of personality on higher-order cognition.

Habilitationsschrift : Philosophie : Tübingen, Eberhard-Karls-Universität : 1998. / Bibliographie : p. 325-335.

Educators from schools located in the Midlands region of KwaZulu Natal were approached to participate in the present study with the aim of investigating educators' perceptions of their learners' intelligence. School type differences in educator estimates of their learners' overall and multiple intelligences, and the best predictors of learners' overall intelligence were investigated. Information was elicited pertaining to educators' views on intelligence and the multiple intelligences most valued in pedagogical practice. A questionnaire was administered to educators from Previously Disadvantaged High and Primary Schools, and Ex-Model C High and Primary Schools. Educators from Previously Disadvantaged High Schools gave comparatively lower estimations of their male and female learners' intelligences. Mathematical and verbal intelligence were shown to predominate as the foundations for academic intelligence, especially for male learners, while cultural and social intelligences were included as best predictors of female learners' overall intelligence. A preponderance of the Western associated academic intelligences (mathematical and verbal) was demonstrated in pedagogical practices. The study highlights the need to engage with educators' implicit perceptions of intelligence to facilitate change in education. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2006.