Numerous developmental studies assess general cognitive ability, not as the primary variable of interest, but rather as a background variable. Raven’s Progressive Matrices is an easy to administer ...non‐verbal test that is widely used to measure general cognitive ability. However, the relatively long administration time (up to 45 min) is still a drawback for developmental studies as it often leaves little time to assess the primary variable of interest. Therefore, we used a machine learning approach – regularized regression in combination with cross‐validation – to develop a short 15‐item version. We did so for two age groups, namely 9 to 12 years and 13 to 16 years. The short versions predicted the scores on the standard full 60‐item versions to a very high degree r = 0.89 (9–12 years) and r = 0.93 (13–16 years). We, therefore, recommend using the short version to measure general cognitive ability as a background variable in developmental studies.
High-school students decide in which tasks to invest their cognitive effort on a daily basis. At school, such decisions often relate to feedback-learning situations (e.g., whether or not to do ...homework exercises). To investigate how willing high-school students are to invest their cognitive effort in such situations, we administered in this preregistered study a feedback-learning task in combination with a cognitive effort-discounting task – a paradigm to quantify willingness to invest effort. We did so to a large sample (N = 195) from average educational backgrounds in an ecologically valid setting (a school class). We specifically tested whether high-school students discounted their effort in feedback-learning tasks, which proved to be the case, and whether this discounting was differentially affected by positive and negative feedback, which proved not to be the case. We also found that learning was unaffected by feedback valence, except that students learned better from positive than from negative feedback when high effort was required. These results imply that in a school setting, where feedback learning is common, high-school students are less willing to invest cognitive effort in more effortful tasks irrespective of feedback valence, and that positive feedback can aid learning when high effort is required. We provide several recommendations as to how our proposed combination of feedback learning and effort discounting could be used to understand and improve students' academic motivation.
High school students sometimes struggle with motivation for learning, at least partly because of low willingness to invest their effort. By investigating high-school students' willingness to invest effort for learning within an educational context, we aim to enhance understanding of this decision-making process in high-school students. Our results indicate that in a school setting, where feedback learning is common, high-school students are less willing to invest cognitive effort in more effortful tasks irrespective of whether they receive positive or negative feedback, but that positive feedback can aid learning when learning tasks require high effort. These results imply that positive feedback may reduce the costs of learning or increase its benefits for difficult tasks.
•Combined effort-discounting with feedback-learning to assess high-school students’ willingness to invest effort for learning•High school students were less willing to invest effort in learning tasks as effort requirements increased•Overall, willingness to invest effort as well as learning performance were unaffected by feedback valence•Yet, when effort requirements were high, students learned better from positive compared to negative feedback•This study advances our knowledge on high school students’ willingness to invest effort for learning in educational contexts
Making better decisions typically requires obtaining information relevant to that decision. Adolescence is marked by increasing agency in decision-making and an accompanying increase in impulsive ...decisions, suggesting that one characteristic of adolescent decision-making is a tendency to make less-informed decisions. Adolescents could also be especially averse to the effort associated with acquiring relevant information to make decisions. To investigate this possibility, we recruited adolescents (Mage = 15.02 years) in upper-secondary schools and young adults (Mage = 20.53 years) attending university in the Netherlands to complete an effort-based information sampling task, in which participants could sample information until obtaining sufficient evidence to make a decision. Effort costs for sampling were systematically varied. Surprisingly, adolescents sampled more evidence than adults before making decisions when sampling effort costs were low. Further, adolescents obtained stronger evidence prior to their decisions than adults as effort costs increased, exhibiting less aversion to effort costs associated with information sampling. Exploratory computational models supported these findings. Both adolescents and adults used simple heuristics in deciding whether to sample additional information or make a final decision, and adolescents sought a higher evidence threshold before deciding compared with adults. These results suggest that adolescents may require more certainty to make decisions compared with adults and be less averse to effort costs when gathering information to aid decisions.
•It remains unclear what underlies individual differences in adolescents’ willingness to invest cognitive effort within the academic context.•This was examined in a preregistered experimental study ...within an educationally diverse sample.•Willingness to invest cognitive effort was related to need for cognition and cognitive capacity.
There exist large individual differences in students’ willingness to invest cognitive effort within the academic domain. In a preregistered study, we investigated whether individual differences in adolescents’ willingness to invest cognitive effort, as assessed by an experimental effort discounting task, were related to need for cognition, academic motivation and cognitive capacity. We found that adolescents’ willingness to invest cognitive effort was related to need for cognition and cognitive capacity as indexed by task-performance. Our results demonstrate that individual differences in need for cognition and cognitive capacity contribute to differences in adolescents’ cognitive effort-investment, but academic motivation does not.
Cognitive ability of adolescents is often measured using the Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices (RSPM). However, the RSPM knows a long administration time which may be suboptimal, as time-on-task ...effects are known to increase fatigue, to lower motivation, and to worsen performance on cognitive tasks. Therefore, a shortened version for adolescents was developed recently. In the current preregistered study we investigated this shortened version in a sample of adolescents (N = 99) of average educational backgrounds. We tested whether the shortened RSPM is a valid alternative to the original RSPM, which proved to be the case, as we observed a moderate to high correlation between the two versions. Moreover, we tested version effects on fatigue, motivation and performance. Fatigue was lower and motivation was higher after completing the short compared to the original version, and performance was better in the short compared to the original version. However, additional analyses suggested that beneficial version effects on performance were not due to reduced time-on-task, but due to the short version containing less difficult items than the original version. Moreover, version related differences in performance were not related to version related differences in fatigue and motivation. We conclude that the shortened version of the RSPM is a valid alternative to the original version, and that the shortened version is beneficial in terms of fatigue and motivation, but that these beneficial effects on fatigue and motivation do not carry over to performance.
In this preregistered study, we examined factors influencing academic motivation among secondary school students (aged 13 – 15) on a day-to-day basis. Using cognitive effort-discounting (Cog-ED) as ...behavioral manifestation of motivation and self-report for internal motivational state, we utilized a daily diary method (two-week protocol, N = 39, total N = 342 diaries) to explore how these measures relate to daily experiences of need satisfaction (i.e., autonomy, competence, relatedness), social support, invested homework hours, stress and physical (versus online) school attendance both at within- and between-person levels. Employing Bayesian hierarchical modeling, we found that motivation to invest effort in learning (Cog-ED) and self-reported academic motivation were higher on days when students experienced greater competence. In addition self-reported academic motivation was higher on days when students experienced more social support from classmates and teachers, invested more effort in homework and physically attended school, but lower on days when students experienced more stress. Additionally, both motivation to invest effort in learning (Cog-ED) and self-reported academic motivation were higher for those with greater average levels of perceived autonomy and support from parents. Moreover, students who, on average, dedicated more time to homework, reported elevated stress levels, and received greater support from teachers reported higher academic motivation. Conversely, those with greater support from classmates reported lower academic motivation. These findings stress the importance of cultivating feelings of competence, supportive environments and stress reduction on a daily basis, while highlighting the importance of perceived autonomy, adult social support and physical school attendance for academic motivation. Importantly, the current study contributes by assessing motivation both behaviorally and via self-report, and fills a gap by extending trait-level motivation research to the daily-level.
Research demonstrates the effects of social context on individual drinking, but the underlying neural processes remain unclear. For this purpose, we developed a social multi-sensory alcohol ...cue-reactivity (SMAC) fMRI task. Neural activity during visually presented offers to drink beer or water while listening to audio fragments of social drinking contexts were compared in 38 social drinkers and associations with craving, drinking willingness, and ad libitum alcohol consumption in a social context were investigated. Procedures were repeated one week later assessing test-retest reliability. The SMAC increased craving in Sessions 1 and 2, with post-task craving predicting drinking willingness in Session 1. Post-task craving in Session 2 predicted the chance of ad libitum drinking. No other effects were significant. Alcohol-cue specific activity in a priori regions of interests (ROIs) did not correlate with alcohol use measures, however, lower ratings of willingness to accept soft drinks was associated with higher activity in response to alcohol cues in the insula (Session 1). Test-retest reliability of the task was poor. Whole-brain and ROI activity during beer and water conditions correlated consistently with multiple measures of alcohol use. One possible interpretation of these findings is that social context itself may act as a phasic alcohol-relevant cue regardless of whether a water or alcohol cue is displayed.
To improve the care for patients with motor neuron disease an e-health innovation for continuous monitoring of disease progression and patients' well-being (ALS H&C) was implemented in 10 ...multidisciplinary rehabilitation settings. The first aim was to evaluate the implementation of ALS H&C by assessing several implementation outcomes, technology acceptance and usability of the innovation according to the end users. The secondary aim was to explore differences in these outcomes between the teams with sustainable and unsustainable implementation.
The chosen implementation strategy was a combination of the implementation process model by Grol & Wensing and a participatory action research approach. In three meetings with multidisciplinary project groups the innovation was introduced, the expected barriers/facilitators identified, and action plans to resolve each barrier developed. After a 3-month pilot phase, patients and their healthcare providers were asked to complete an online evaluation survey to assess implementation outcomes, based on Proctor's evaluation framework (i.e., acceptability, feasibility, fidelity, sustainability). Telemedicine technology acceptance was assessed according the technology acceptance model of Chau, and user experiences with the System Usability Scale (SUS). Implementation outcomes of teams with sustainable implementation (continuation after completion of the pilot phase) and unsustainable implementation (discontinuation after the pilot phase) were compared.
The implementation outcomes from the patients' perspective (N = 71) were positive; they found ALS H&C to be an acceptable and feasible care concept. Patients' technology acceptance was high, with positive attitudes towards ALS H&C, and positive views on perceived technology control, usefulness, and ease of use. Patients rated their satisfaction with the (web) app on a scale from 1 (not satisfied at all) to 10 (very satisfied) with a 7.0 (median; IQR 1.0). Healthcare providers (N = 76) also found ALS H&C acceptable and appropriate as well, but were less positive about the feasibility and usability of ALS H&C (mean SUS 58.8 SD 11.3). ALS H&C has largely been implemented as intended and the implementation was sustainable in 7 teams. Teams who discontinued ALS H&C after the pilot phase (N = 2) had more fidelity issues.
A participatory action research approach supported by theoretical approaches used in implementation science led to a sustainable implementation of ALS H&C in 7 of the participating teams. To improve implementation success, additional implementation strategies to increase feasibility, usability and fidelity are necessary.
Trial NL8542 registered at Netherlands Trial Register (trialregister.nl) on 15th April 2020.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
CEKLJ, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
We outline a network method to synthesize a literature overview from search results obtained by multiple team members. Several network statistics are used to create a single representativeness ...ranking. We illustrate the method with the dispersed literature on a common misinterpretation of analysis of covariance (ANCOVA). The network method yields a top ten list of the most relevant articles that students and researchers can take as a point of departure for a more detailed study on this topic. The proposed methodology is implemented in Shiny, an open-source R package.
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