University of North Carolina at Greensboro

About: University of North Carolina at Greensboro is a education organization based out in Greensboro, North Carolina, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Poison control. The organization has 5481 authors who have published 13715 publications receiving 456239 citations. The organization is also known as: UNCG & UNC Greensboro.

Why do ideas get more creative across time? An executive interpretation of the serial order effect in divergent thinking tasks.

Abstract: The serial order effect—the tendency for later responses to a divergent thinking task to be better than earlier ones—is one of the oldest and most robust findings in modern creativity work. But why do ideas get better? Using new methods that afford a fine-grained look at temporal trajectories, we contrasted two explanations: the classic spreading activation account and a new account based on executive and strategic aspects of creative thought. After completing measures of fluid intelligence and personality, a sample of young adults (n = 133) completed a 10-min unusual uses task. Each response was time-stamped and then rated for creativity by three raters. Multilevel structural equation models estimated the trajectories of creativity and fluency across time and tested if intelligence moderated the effects of time. As in past work, creativity increased sharply with time and flattened slightly by the task's end, and fluency was highest in the task's first minute and then dropped sharply. Intelligence, however, moderated the serial order effect—as intelligence increased, the serial order effect diminished. Taken together, the findings are more consistent with a view that emphasizes executive processes, particularly processes involved in the strategic retrieval and manipulation of knowledge, than the simple spreading of activation to increasingly remote concepts.

The Cultural Production of Science in Reform-based Physics: Girls’ Access, Participation, and Resistance

Abstract: Recent literature in science education suggests that, to transform girls‘ participation, learning, and identities within school science, we must think about ways to engage girls in different kinds of educational activities that promote broader meanings of science and scientist. This study was designed to examine more deeply this call for a changed science curriculum and its implications for girls‘ participation, interest, and emerging science identities. In this ethnographic study, I examine the culturally produced meanings of science and scientist in a reform-based physics classroom that used a curriculum called Active Physics, how these meanings reproduced and contested larger sociohistorical (and prototypical) meanings of science and scientist, and the ways girls participated within and against these meanings. The girls in this upper middle class school were mostly concerned with accessing and maintaining a good student identity (rather than connecting to science in any meaningful way) and resisted promoted meanings of science and scientist that they perceived as threatening to their good student identities. Their embrace of the ways school defined success (via grades and college admission) produced a meaning of Active Physics as a way to get credentials on a transcript and ensured their disconnection from real-world, meaningful science and science identities. The story of girls‘ participation and resistance in Active Physics complicates our quest for gender-fair science and highlights the power of sociohistorical meanings of schooling and science in producing educational subjects.

Behavioral and Physiological Antecedents of Inhibited and Uninhibited Behavior

Abstract: 4-month-old infants were specifically selected for patterns of affective and motoric reactivity that were hypothesized to be associated with later inhibited and uninhibited behavior. Infants were classified as high on motor activity and negative affect, high on motor activity and positive affect, or low on motor activity and affect. Brain electrical activity was assessed in these infants at 9 months of age, and behavior toward novelty was observed at 14 months of age. Infants who were high on motor activity and negative affect exhibited greater right frontal EEG activation at 9 months of age and inhibited behavior at 14 months of age. Infants classified as high motor/high positive at 4 months of age exhibited uninhibited behavior at 14 months of age. No relations were found between frontal asymmetry at 9 months of age and inhibited behavior at 14 months of age. However, greater activation in both the left and right frontal hemispheres was associated with higher inhibition scores at 14 months of age. These findings are discussed in terms of the role that affective and physiological reactivity may play in the development of social behavior during toddlerhood.