Learning to think critically is a key educational goal for higher education that presents a significant challenge for many students. Surprisingly, few studies have reported students’ views and perceptions towards instructional methods in critical thinking. The current study explored university students’ experiences and perceptions towards an online intervention designed to improve critical thinking skills. The intervention employed video-based learning to introduce four common informal logical fallacies to students across two micro-learning episodes administered online. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 30 university students to gain insight into four key areas: i) the perceived usefulness of the intervention for critical thinking development, ii) the presentation of learning materials, iii) the factors impacting their engagement, iv) and the potential of this approach to support mainstream provisions. We identified four main themes using thematic analysis: 1) building understanding and awareness of critical thinking, 2) effective video design and presentation, 3) valuing technology-enhanced learning approach, and 4) divergent experiences derived from the practice phase. These themes encapsulate students’ experiences of learning critical thinking as a highly sophisticated skill within an online learning environment and their preferences towards an effective video design. We discuss the implications of these findings for future pedagogical research and training of critical thinking in higher education.

The implicit association test (IAT) provides a sensitive measure of attitudes to social dimensions such as race, gender or disability using a response speed procedure. The automatisation deficit account of dyslexia attributes the reading (and broader) difficulties of dyslexic people to reduced speed and strength of stimulus–response habit formation and, therefore, predicts reduced implicit bias for individuals with dyslexia. This novel prediction was tested using the ‘Project Implicit’ IAT database on attitudes to disability. Data from over 460,000 respondents was analysed, including 22,747 with physical disability (PD), 14,700 with dyslexia, and 1721 with dyscalculia. The dyslexia group did indeed show significantly less ‘Disability Bias’ than both the PD and no disability groups. Intriguingly, the dyscalculia group showed significantly less disability bias even than the dyslexia group. The results are interpreted within the learning framework of broader automatisation deficit and have ramifications for understanding both conditions and the processes of development of implicit bias in neurodiverse and neurotypical populations.

There is pervasive evidence that problems in sensory processing occur across a range of neurodevelopmental disorders. The present study compared the sensory profile of typically developing (TD) children with those of children with learning disorders (LD), autism spectrum disorder (ASD), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and with developmental language disorder (DLD), and investigated the association between the child's sensory profile and reading and maths learning difficulties. Seventy-four parents of children aged between 8 and 10 years old participated, completing the Colorado Learning Difficulties Questionnaire (CLDQ) and the Child Sensory Processing Profile (CSP-2) assessments of their child's performance on literacy/mathematics and sensory processing, respectively. There was strong evidence of abnormal sensory processing across the range of learning disorders and across all four 'quadrants' of the CSP-2. The children with ASD, ADHD, and DLD had major abnormalities. In contrast, children with LD showed significant but more modest differences. There was a significant association between the sensory profile and the mathematics component of the CLDQ. The findings highlight shared abnormalities in sensory processing across the range of developmental disorders and have substantial theoretical and applied implications.

Critical thinking is identified as a key educational outcome in higher education curricula; however, it is not trivial to support students in building this multifaceted skill. In this study, we evaluated a brief online learning intervention focusing on informal fallacy identification, a hallmark critical-thinking skill. The intervention used a bite-sized video learning approach, which has been shown to promote student engagement. Video-based learning was implemented within a precision teaching (PT) framework, which modulates the exposure of individual learners to the learning material to enable them to build ‘fluency’ in the targeted skills. In one of the learning conditions, PT was applied synergistically with domain-general problem-based training to support generalisation. The intervention consisted of two learning episodes and was administered to three groups (learning conditions) of 19 participants each: a PT fluency-based training group; a PT + group, where PT was combined with problem-based training; and a self-directed learning control group. All three groups showed comparable improvements in fallacy identification on taught (post-episode tests) and unseen materials (post-intervention assessment), with lower-scoring participants showing higher gains than high-scoring participants. The results of the knowledge retention tests a week later were also comparable between groups. Importantly, in the domain-general fallacy-identification assessment (post-intervention), the two PT groups showed higher improvements than the control group. These findings suggest that the integration of bite-sized video learning technologies with PT can improve students’ critical-thinking skills. Furthermore, PT, on its own or combined with problem-based training, can improve their skill to generalise learning to novel contexts. We discuss the educational implications of our findings.

Adjustments to life and learning following the COVID-19 pandemic have transformed user acceptance of online learning methods. It is, therefore, imperative to analyse factors relating to user performance and preferences for such interactions. In this study, we combined video-based learning with precision teaching to reinforce previously learnt statistics skills in university students without a mathematical background. We developed a learning design consisting of eight ‘bite-sized’ online learning episodes. Each episode started with a brief learning video followed by a practice phase and an end-of-episode assessment. The practice phase differed in two groups of participants, matched on statistics attainment pre- intervention. A precision-teaching intervention group (N = 19) completed practice guided by a frequency-based approach aiming at building fluency in statistics. A control group (N = 19) completed self-directed practice for the same amount of time as the intervention group. All participants completed a statistics attainment test and a questionnaire on their attitudes towards statistics pre- and post- intervention, and a review of the learning materials post-intervention. The intervention group achieved, consistently, higher scores in all end-of-episode assessments compared to the control group. Both groups showed significant and comparable improvements in statistics attainment post-intervention. Both groups also reported more positive feelings towards statistics post-intervention, while the review of the learning materials suggested that the video-based learning design was well-received by students. Our results suggest that video-based learning has great potential to support, as a supplementary teaching aid, university students in learning statistics. We discuss future research directions and implications of the study.

The use and acceptance of online learning have increased following the COVID-19 pandemic. This mixed-methods study examined learners' preferences and performance in online learning interactions in relation to two factors: 'bite-sized' learning and 'presenter status' in instructional videos. University students ( N = 18) without a mathematical background utilised bite-sized online learning episodes focusing on statistics. Each episode included a 10-minute instructional video followed by an assessment. The videos implemented three alternative 'presenter-status' conditions: lecturer, student-imitating-lecturer or student-peer-tutor. Individual students completed three episodes, one from each presenter-status condition (counterbalanced). Participants presented high performance in the post-episode assessments, irrespective of presenter status. Students also reported remarkably positive views towards bite-sized learning in user-satisfaction questionnaires. Finally, qualitative analysis of open-ended responses and interviews uncovered three main themes: positive learning experiences, divergent attitudes towards video-based learning, and differential preferences for presenter status. These findings have clear implications for teaching and learning in higher education.

Background The current study aimed to understand the role of callousness, affective dissonance, and two subtypes of sensation seeking personality traits – 1) disinhibition and 2) thrill and adventure seeking – in physically aggressive and non-aggressive antisocial behaviours (ASB) among educated youth and to explore the gender differences in them. Participants and procedure An online survey was sent to a large sample of students at a UK university. Initially, a sample of N = 539 participants was collected but after screening out the data, N = 429 participants were included for analyses based on the sam-pling criteria. Results Callousness, disinhibition, and affective dissonance significantly predicted both antisocial behaviour subtypes. We found multidimensional nature of callousness in predicting antisocial behaviours, and an intriguing relationship be-tween thrill and adventure seeking and affective dissonance. Interesting gender differences emerged. Conclusions This study has implications for the understanding of the competitive roles of gender-based psychopathological per-sonality traits in terms of callousness and affective dissonance and sensation seeking tendencies in physically ag-gressive and non-aggressive antisocial behaviours.

Creativity is fast becoming recognised as a key skill for employability and for business success. Scientific research and practice-led initiatives for developing creativity require reliable and valid methods of its measurement, particularly in designs for which a large participant sample needs to be tested quickly. The Widening, Connecting, and Reorganizing (WCR) model (published in Italian) has proved useful in recent research on creativity, with the advantage that it can be administered online in around 15 minutes. For this study, we first translated the WCR into English (the WCR-E) and then compared creativity scores on the WCR-E test with scores for the same 80 undergraduate participants on the more traditional Test of Alternative Uses (TAU) to examine its validity. There were significant correlations between the three elements of the TAU and the WCR-E, suggesting overlaps between the WCR-E measures and the TAU constructs. Principal Components Analysis identified three constructs which together accounted for 72% of the variance in the data. PC1 (38% of the variance) loaded strongly on TAU, C and R, whereas PC2 (20% of the variance) loaded only on two supplementary WCR-E measures, and PC3 (15% of the variance) loaded only on W. We label these constructs 'Originality', 'Deepening' and 'Widening' respectively. These results indicate that the WCR-E test not only assesses the major 'Originality' construct of the TAU, but also two additional constructs, and does so in a highly time- and cost-effective fashion. While these results would benefit from further testing, they do indicate clearly that the WCR-E test is suitable for use in scientific research as well as for evaluating the effectiveness of creativity development initiatives.

With respect to supporting student well-being and success, the current research developed a peer support scheme, built on the principles of Social Identity Theory (SIT). This was targeted towards first year undergraduate psychology students, in which measures of collective identity, sense of belonging, group efficacy, happiness and resilience were obtained, along with attendance and academic attainment. Following one academic year of being part of our peer support scheme, participants (N = 90) completed a questionnaire and consented to their attendance and attainment data to be used. It was found that students' collective identity was positively related to their sense of belonging, group efficacy beliefs and happiness. Further, the sense of belonging was a reliable predictor of happiness, but not attendance or academic attainment. Therefore, there is some evidence to suggest that an SIT-driven peer support scheme can support students' psychosocial well-being, although more is needed to ascertain whether this could be developed further to observe any course-related outcomes. Theoretical contributions to SIT are therefore presented, in which the insights can be applied to Higher Education beyond the UK.

A fundamental issue for research in mathematics disability (MD) and reading disability (RD) is: If these disabilities are clearly distinct, why is there so high a level of comorbidity, together with the converse; if these disabilities are so similar, why are there clear differences in underlying causes and aetiology? In order to address this puzzle, we introduce the “360 degree analysis” (360DA) framework and apply it to the overlap between RD and MD. The 360DA process starts by analyzing the issue from four perspectives: theoretical, developmental, affective, and pedagogical. Under 360DA, these analyses are then integrated to provide insights for theory, and for individual assessment and support, together with directions for future progress. The analyses confirm extensive similarities between arithmetic and reading development in terms of rote learning, executive function (EF), and affective trauma, but also major differences in terms of the conceptual needs, the motor coordination needs, and the methods of scaffolding. In terms of theory, commonalities are interpreted naturally in terms of initial general developmental delay followed by domain-independent affective trauma following school failure. Dissociations are interpreted in terms of cerebellar vs. hippocampal learning networks, sequential vs. spatial processing, and language vs. spatial scaffolding, with a further dimension of the need for accurate fixation for reading. The framework has significant theoretical and applied implications.

Forty adolescents at risk of school failure, including 18 with a diagnosis of dyslexia, were assessed on measures of physical, cognitive and affective well-being. Overall both groups of participants showed marked signs of anxiety together with at risk performance on a range of cognitive and physical measures, with the dyslexic participants significantly more adversely affected on almost all measures. Half of the participants then undertook an 8 weeks internet-based “cerebellar challenge” programme within their school environment, with the remainder having equivalent time in the existing “School Support as Usual” (SSAU) activities. Compared with their initial performance, and with the SSAU group, the intervention group showed significant improvement on measures of motor performance, declarative learning, procedural learning, and mental health, both for those with dyslexia and those without. The findings are interpreted in terms of increased self-efficacy and improvements in cerebellar and hippocampal function. Given its scaleability, the intervention may prove valuable for many adolescents at risk of school failure.

Theories and definitions entrepreneurship have taken a number of different approaches. According to Gartner, entrepreneurship has been categorised as a behaviour description; Gartner, Bird, and Starr discuss entrepreneurship as a type of organising exploring its relationship to organisation behaviour theory, at the same time describing entrepreneurship theory as emergent. Generalised self-efficacy is considered to be a personality trait of importance for entrepreneurs because people who perform highly in this characteristic tend to persevere when uncertain situations and problems arise, in order to win the challenge and also to find opportunities within the difficulties. However perspective within psychology, known as positive psychology, discusses the advantages and good qualities that people with dyslexia may have, compared to people without dyslexia. The highest aim of positive psychology is to re-direct the efforts of psychology away from a more remedial, reformative preoccupation with the worst scenarios in life and towards developing and evolving the highest qualities in a person.

The aim of this study was to find out if subtypes of empathy, sensation seeking and callous and unemotional traits predicted physically aggressive and non-aggressive antisocial behaviours in a student sample and also if there were any gender differences. An online survey on Qualtrics was administered to 428 university volunteers aged 18-25 years, with 9 personality measures through university email distribution list. Hierarchical regression analyses were used. Callousness was the only personality variable to contribute unique variance with age providing further unique variance. This study showed an important interplay of callous and unemotional traits, empathy and sensation seeking in differentially predicting gender-based antisocial behaviour subtypes. The current study has elaborated gender-based personality models predicting physically aggressive and the non-aggressive antisocial behaviour subtypes and contributed to the understanding of psychopathy.

There is pervasive evidence that problems in sensory processing occur across a range of developmental disorders, but their aetiology and clinical significance remain unclear. The present study investigated the relation between sensory processing and literacy skills in children with and without a background of special educational needs (SEN). Twenty-six children aged between 7 and 12 years old, from both regular classes and SEN programmes, participated. Following baseline tests of literacy, fine motor skills and naming speed, two sets of instruments were administered: the carer-assessed Child Sensory Profile-2 and a novel Audiovisual Animal Stroop (AVAS) test. The SEN group showed significantly higher ratings on three Child Sensory Profile-2 quadrants, together with body position ratings. The SEN participants also showed a specific deficit when required to ignore an accompanying incongruent auditory stimulus on the AVAS. Interestingly, AVAS performance correlated significantly with literacy scores and with the sensory profile scores. It is proposed that the children with SEN showed a specific deficit in “filtering out” irrelevant auditory input. The results highlight the importance of including analysis of sensory processes within theoretical and applied approaches to developmental differences and suggest promising new approaches to the understanding, assessment, and support of children with SEN.

It is now evident that explanations of many developmental disorders need to include a network perspective. In earlier work, we proposed that developmental dyslexia (DD) is well-characterized in terms of impaired procedural learning within the language networks, with the cerebellum being the key structure involved. Here, we deepen the analysis to include the child’s developmental process of constructing these networks. The “Delayed Neural Commitment (DNC)” framework proposes that, in addition to slower skill acquisition, dyslexic children take longer to build (and to rebuild) the neural networks that underpin the acquisition of reading. The framework provides an important link backwards in time to the development of executive function networks and the earlier development of networks for language and speech. It is consistent with many theories of dyslexia while providing fruitful suggestions for further research at the genetic, brain, cognitive and behavioral levels of explanation. It also has significant implications for assessment and teaching.

'Emotional reactivity' (ER) is an important construct in the analysis of individual temperamental differences, and has accounted for significant variance in studies with respect to its definition. Between 1920 and 2015, the meaning of ER has varied from physiology of emotional reactions, to stress, depression, and as a sub-type of empathy. This paper highlights the confusion in the literature about the meaning of ER and raises questions about the current use of the term ER as a valid construct. It clarifies heterogeneity within ER through the creation of a framework to explain different subtypes of ER and suggests new labels designed to help researchers specify the constructs underpinning the term ER.

It is becoming clear that in the 21st century, a focus on skill development in education is necessary to complement the curriculum, particularly with regards to creative problem solving. The emerging Pedagogy of Play seems to provide a framework to facilitate this but is not easily applicable in the mainstream UK due to difficulties in empowering teachers to use it on an everyday basis. In response to this, a simple methodology was developed to encourage teachers to implement a Pedagogy of Play approach in the secondary UK classroom, and a control experimental Student Focused method was explored in a similar way. A classroom evaluation of the two methods was undertaken along with a control teaching as usual group. This was done in a classroom timeframe collecting pre-and-post measurements of creative thinking using the Widening, Connecting and Reorganising model of creativity, in addition to teacher generated attainment at the same time points. Results indicated that teachers showed clear appreciation of, and engagement with, the approach for both innovative methods. The use of Pedagogy of Play led to significant enhancements of creative thinking while the Student Focused method did not, although this group did show a significant improvement in subject attainment. This indicates it is possible to enhance creativity within the school curriculum and that Pedagogy of Play may be a way of doing this. Future research should focus on the exploration of a hybrid methodology to enhance both creative thinking and increase subject attainment.

The goal of the behavior analysis (BA) approach is to code, in real time, individuals' sequential utterances during team meetings, thereby providing objective data that can be used for immediate post-meeting behavioral feedback. The approach was developed during industrial training courses to improve employee's interactive skills. Although a comprehensive 13-category system has been established, the value of the BA system involves principles for category development and the provision of immediate feedback to help people improve their interactions with others. Accordingly, BA could help teams improve language use (Leshed et al., 2009), dysfunctional team processes (Johnson, Hollenbeck, Scott DeRue, Barnes, & Jundt, 2013), and performance (Gabelica, Van den Bossche, Segers, & Gijselaers, 2012).