Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Examining The Relationship Between Fact Learning And Higher Order Learning Via Retrieval Practice, Pooja Kay Agarwal '01

Doctoral Dissertations

The development of higher order skills is a desired outcome of education. Some believe that higher order learning can be improved directly, whereas others argue that higher order learning can be improved via the enhancement of factual or conceptual knowledge. The relationship between fact and higher order learning is often speculated, but empirically unknown.

This project examines whether retrieval practice via quizzing, a strategy typically used to enhance fact learning, can be used as a strategy to improve higher order skills in both laboratory and applied settings. In the current study, higher order skills were considered to comprise the understand, …

Boffin's Books And Darwin's Finches: Victorian Cultures Of Collecting, Michael W. Hancock '89

Doctoral Dissertations

Although wealthy continental virtuosos had passionately and selectively accumulated a variety of natural and artificial objects from the Renaissance onwards, not until the nineteenth century did collecting become a conspicuous national pastime among all classes in Britain. As industry and empire made available many new and exotic goods for acquisition and display, the collection as a cultural form offered the Victorians a popular strategy of self-fashioning that was often represented in the literature of the age as a source of prestige and social legitimation. Through interdisciplinary readings of Victorian fiction, narrative nonfiction, and poetry, my study examines how textual representations …

Memory And Fragmentation In Dissociative Identity Disorder, Margaret Rose Barlow '96

Doctoral Dissertations

Dissociative identity disorder (DID), formerly called multiple personalities, is a condition in which aspects of experience and memory are separated from each other and from awareness. The current study adds to the literature in this area by utilizing a broad conceptualization of memory functioning in DID, combining ecologically valid memory tests with experimental paradigms, and examining shareability, switching, and integration. Eleven women with DID participated in a two-session experiment that included a variety of memory measures. Participants were given no instructions regarding switching among alters, but were later asked how often they had switched. They reported significantly higher levels of …

The Logic Of Pre-Electoral Coalition Formation, Sona Nadenichek Golder '89

Doctoral Dissertations

Political parties who wish to exercise executive power are typically forced to enter some form of coalition. Parties can either form a pre-electoral coalition prior to an election or they can compete independently and enter a government coalition afterwards. Although there is a vast coalition literature, there are no theoretical or empirical studies of coalitions that form prior to an election. This dissertation seeks to redress this imbalance in our knowledge of coalitions by explaining the variation in electoral coalition formation.

The existing literature implicitly suggests that pre-electoral coalition formation is a simple function of electoral rules: the more disproportional …

The Use Of Prior Knowledge In Learning From Examples, Stephen B. Blessing '89

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the way people acquire procedures from examples, and provides a computational model of the results. In four experiments, people learned an analog of algebra. For each experiment, the initial know ledge that people had of the task was varied. In two experiments (Experiments 1 and 3), the syntactic know ledge that people had concerning the task w as manipulated. The knowledge of syntax that participants had, particularly the ability to correctly parse the character string, was found to be a major determiner in the way participants acquired the rules. Experiment 2 explicitly manipulated participant's awareness as to …