Open-ended Instruction Research Articles

Music Therapy Educators’ Perspectives on Practica Community Partnerships

Abstract Music therapy educators are tasked by the American Music Therapy Association with creating practica placements for students. However, open-ended instructions result in many differing structures of placements and no formal guidelines or codifying supports for educators working with community partners. The purpose of this descriptive survey study was to provide an understanding of music therapy educators’ perspectives on successful and challenging elements of community partnerships and evaluative factors educators use when creating, monitoring, or discontinuing practica placements. Of the 139 participants, 100 currently teach or previously taught music therapy, and their quantitative and qualitative responses were included in data analysis. Educators perceived relational elements of partnerships as greater contributors to success than logistical elements. They identified pro-active and consistent communication (23.69%, n = 59), commitment to the partnership (18.07%, n = 45), and partners’ perception of students providing meaningful services (18.07%, n = 45) as necessary to successful partnerships. The most prominent challenging element was partners who did not value or understand music therapy. However, only 2.9% of educators (n = 2) indicated teaching partners about music therapy and its benefits as a part of their processes for establishing and monitoring community partnerships. The recognition that education and advocacy of music therapy play an underlying role in practica relationships can help guide educators toward more successful partnerships. Recommended future research should include perspectives of community partners and students on practica relationships.

Spontaneity competes with intention to influence the coordination dynamics of interpersonal performance tendencies

Research has shown that spontaneous visual coupling supports frequency entrainment, phase attraction, and intermittent interpersonal coordination when co-actors are switched from a no-vision (NV) to vision (V) context. In two experiments, co-actors started in a NV context while producing the same or different amplitude movements. The same amplitude resulted in similar self-paced frequencies, while different amplitudes resulted in disparate frequencies. In experiment 1, co-actors were instructed to maintain amplitude while receiving no instructions to coordinate their actions. Frequency and phase entrainment was limited in the V context even when co-actors started the NV context with the same amplitude. In experiment 2, co-actors were instructed to maintain amplitude and intentionally coordinate together, but not at a specific pattern. Significant frequency modulations occurred to maintain amplitude as the co-actors sought to coordinate their actions. With the open-ended instructions, co-actors produced in-phase and anti-phase coordination along with intermittent performance exhibited by shifts between a variety of stable relative phase patterns. The proposed hypotheses and findings are discussed within the context of a shared manifold representation for joint action contexts, with the coordination dynamics expressed by the HKB model of relative phase serving to conceptualization the representations in the shared manifold.

Case Article—Creating a Brick Empire Through Data Visualization and Analytics

This case study provides a comprehensive decision-making scenario that takes students through all three types of analytics—descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive—to provide recommendations to a decision maker. The scenario focuses on an individual investor who is purchasing LEGO sets from retailers with the goal of selling them for a higher price on the aftermarket in a few years once they retire from shelves. Students must create visualizations to generate insights from the data and develop a regression model to identify sets that represent value investment opportunities. In the extension case they must take their estimated values and optimize the decisions of which sets to purchase to meet the decision maker’s investment goals using an integer program. Students also have the opportunity to develop soft skills in problem solving and communicating results and dealing with missing data points in a data set that is larger than standard textbook data sets but is still a manageable size for introductory students. The open-ended instructions make the case appropriate for a wide range of students from the introductory undergraduate level to the advanced graduate level. Supplemental Material: Supplemental materials are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/ited.2023.0288ca . The Teaching Note and data files are available at https://www.informs.org/Publications/Subscribe/Access-Restricted-Materials .

Multi-level meta-analysis of whether fostering creativity during physical activity interventions increases their impact on cognitive and academic outcomes during childhood

Neuroplasticity research supports the idea that varied practice and new environments promote cognitive engagement and enhance learning. Expanding on a meta-analysis of the effect of physical activity interventions on cognition and academic outcomes, we reviewed and quantified the impact of task and environmental factors that foster creative physical activity. Interventions were considered as fostering creative physical activity to a greater extent if (1) they were varied, (2) relied less on technical acquisition, instruction or demonstration, (3) involved open spaces, props, or open-ended instructions, and (4) involved interactions with peers. A wide range of physical activities were considered, from dance to aerobic exercise across 92 studies in 5–12-year-old children. Creativity ratings of physical activity interventions were varied but did not associate with greater beneficial effects on executive functions (k = 45), academic achievement (k = 47), or fluid intelligence (k = 8). Studies assessing on-task behaviour (k = 5) tended not to foster creativity, while reversely studies assessing creativity tended to foster creative physical activities (k = 5). As a group, three studies that fostered more creative PA showed a small significant negative summary effect on cognitive flexibility. Considering qualitative differences in the physical activities performed in schools will improve our understanding of their mechanisms of impact. Future research should consider using more varied measures, including more proximal outcomes that involve body movements (e.g., a Simon Says task to measure inhibitory control).

Designing Open-Ended Instruction for Improving Elementary School Student’s Critical Thinking Ability

The ability to think critically is an important ability that elementary school students must have. The ability to think critically helps students make the right decisions about what to believe and what actions to take in the present or in the future. The ability to think critically can be developed by an open-ended approach to learning mathematics. The open-ended approach uses open-ended problems that have more than one correct answer and various ways of solving. Open-ended problem is expected to motivate students to find solutions independently so that in the process students' critical thinking ability will increase. This study aims to describe the process of developing mathematics learning tools using an open-ended approach for fourth-grade elementary school students to improve critical thinking ability. The learning tools development model consists of 3 phases, namely preliminary research (needs and context analysis, review of literature, development of a conceptual or theoretical framework for the study), prototyping phase (syllabus design, lesson plans, worksheets and expert validation) and assessment phase (limited trials). The trial in this study used a one-group pretest-posttest design with the research subjects of 19 fourth-grade students at Kedungdoro I/306 elementary school. The data collection technique used a device validation sheet, an observation sheet for the implementation of lesson plans and student activities, a student response questionnaire and a critical thinking ability test. The data obtained were analyzed using the average score which was converted according to the defined categories. The results show that the learning tools developed are valid based on the assessment of the two validators, practical based on the implementation of the lesson plan and student activities in the "very good" category, and effective based on the responses of students who are in the "strong" category and student's critical thinking ability that significantly increased with medium category based on paired sample t-test and N-Gain analysis.

24 Hour Choir: Towards a Civic Ethics in Improvisation

24 Hour Choir was a participatory sound project in which over one hundred members of the public sustained the human voice, uninterrupted, across an entire day. The location was the politically fraught area of The Rocks in Sydney, Australia, from which long-standing social housing tenants had recently been evicted. 24 Hour Choir responded to this situation by establishing a sonic means to build solidarity. Singers followed several open-ended instructions that required them to develop individual cooperative strategies inducing a form of civic duty. The results, sonically influenced by the shifting ambience of the city, became a real-time mapping of social relations. 24 Hour Choir is part of the project Super Critical Mass which brings together temporary communities to undertake shared sonic actions in public spaces. Each event is a structured improvisation in which participants’ skills become the parameters for a memorised, behavioural algorithm, extending precedents by Cornelius Cardew and Pauline Oliveros.

Curating Everyday Life: Approaches to Documenting Everyday Soundscapes

Curating Everyday Life: Approaches to Documenting Everyday Soundscapes

Exploring challenging classroom behaviors from teachers’ perspective: a mixed-method study

<b>Background</b><br /> In order to explore the representation of challenging students’ behaviors through teachers’ words, the present paper reports Italian teachers’ replies to the open-ended instruction “Describe the behavior of the student you find most challenging in your class”, analyzed through a mixed-method approach.<br /> <br /> <b>Participants and procedure</b><br /> The respondents were teachers from primary and lower secondary schools (N = 518) in the city of Milan and in other urban and sub-urban areas of the Lombardy Region, Italy.<br /> <br /> <b>Results</b><br /> Results from correspondence analysis of the open question suggested two main factors. The first factor, labeled perceived willfulness, seems to confirm that in the appraisal of challenging behaviors teachers’ personal beliefs about the origin of students’ misconducts play an important role. When behaviors are perceived as “involuntary” (such as learning difficulties), teachers seems to play a more care-taking role in comparison to conducts that are viewed as voluntarily destructive. The second factor can be described as the impact that behaviors have on the teaching process.<br /> <br /> <b>Conclusions</b><br /> The qualitative analysis seems to accurately capture even the nuances of what is portrayed by the quantitative survey and helps us in understanding why, in other Italian studies, the Weak student emerged as the most difficult student for Italian teachers: if this population finds it difficult to discriminate between aggressiveness, hostility and hyperactivity, then it is not surprising that this last category gains salience and, maybe, over-representation in surveys.

Older adults can suppress unwanted memories when given an appropriate strategy.

Memory suppression refers to the ability to exclude distracting memories from conscious awareness, and this ability can be assessed with the think/no-think paradigm. Recent research with older adults has provided evidence suggesting both intact and deficient memory suppression. The present studies seek to understand the conditions contributing to older adults’ ability to suppress memories voluntarily. We report 2 experiments indicating that the specificity of the think/no-think task instructions contributes to older adults’ suppression success: When older adults receive open-ended instructions that require them to develop a retrieval suppression strategy on their own, they show diminished memory suppression compared with younger adults. Conversely, when older adults receive focused instructions directing them to a strategy thought to better isolate inhibitory control, they show suppression-induced forgetting similar to that exhibited by younger adults. Younger adults demonstrate memory suppression regardless of the specificity of the instructions given, suggesting that the ability to select a successful suppression strategy spontaneously may be compromised in older adults. If so, this deficit may be associated with diminished control over unwanted memories in naturalistic settings if impeded strategy development reduces the successful deployment of inhibitory control.

Evidence That Self-Incentives Increase Fruit Consumption: A Randomized Exploratory Trial Among High-Risk Romanian Adolescents

High mortality rates associated with cancer and cardiovascular disease in Romania have been partly attributed to low fruit consumption. The aim of the present research was to test whether self-incentives delivered via implementation intentions could increase fruit consumption among 238 high-risk Romanian adolescents. Participants were randomly allocated to either: (1) a control condition (asked to plan to increase their fruit intake but given no further instruction), (2) a standard implementation intention condition (asked to form an implementation intention using standard open-ended instructions), or (3) a self-incentivizing implementation intention condition (asked to reward themselves at the end of the week if they had successfully consumed an extra portion of fruit each day). There were significant increases in fruit consumption in the self-incentivizing implementation intention condition, but not in the control condition or-contrary to predictions-in the standard implementation intention condition. The findings support the use of implementation intentions to deliver self-incentives and increase fruit consumption, and suggest that providing children with a structured prompt might enhance the effectiveness of implementation intention-based interventions compared with standard implementation intention instructions.

The uncertainty of Experience: On George Brecht’s Event Scores

George Brecht, an artist best known for his associations with Fluxus, is considered to have made significant contributions to emerging traditions of conceptual art and experimental music in the early 1960s. His Event scores, brief verbal scores that comprised lists of terms or open-ended instructions, provided a signature model for indeterminate composition and were ‘used extensively by virtually every Fluxus artist’. This article revisits Brecht’s early writings and research to argue that, while Event scores were adopted within Fluxus performance, they were intended as much more than performance devices. Specifically, Brecht conceived of his works as ‘structures of experience’ that, by revealing the underlying connections between chanced forms, could enable a kind of enlightenment rooted within an experience of a ‘unified reality’.

Viewing instructions impact emotional memory differently in older and young adults.

The current study examines how the instructions given during picture viewing impact age differences in incidental emotional memory. Previous research has suggested that older adults' memory may be better when they make emotional rather than perceptual evaluations of stimuli and that their memory may show a positivity bias in tasks with open-ended viewing instructions. Across two experiments, participants viewing photographs either received open-ended instructions or were asked to make emotionally focused (Experiment 1) or perceptually focused (Experiment 2) evaluations. Emotional evaluations had no impact on older adults' memory, whereas perceptual evaluations reduced older adults' recall of emotional, but not of neutral, pictures. Evidence for the positivity effect was sporadic and was not easier to detect with open-ended viewing instructions. These results suggest that older adults' memory is best when the material to be remembered is emotionally evocative and they are allowed to process it as such.

Preschoolers' use of superordinate relations in classification and language

Preschoolers' difficulty in accessing superordinate relations in classification contrasts sharply with their facility in accessing superordinate relations in language use. We consider two hypotheses regarding this discrepancy. First, certain aspects of classification tasks may obscure superordinate relations. In free classification tasks, the open-ended instructions leave the choice among possible organization schemes unconstrained, allowing for virtually any grouping (e.g., thematic, idiosyncratic), not necessarily a taxonomic grouping. Second, children's facility with superordinate relations in language may be due to a language-specific constraint in development: Children may interpret novel labels as referring to taxonomic (as opposed to thematic or idiosyncratic) relations. In Experiment I, we used ‘clues’ to focus preschoolers' attention on superordinate relations. Clues were (1) superordinate category labels (Label condition); (2) sets of typical category instances (Instance condition); or (3) typical instances with instructions to consider the instances as a group (Group condition). Four-year-olds classified successfully in all conditions. Three-year-olds classified well with labels, but not with instances; their performance in the Group condition was intermediate. In Experiment II, we focus on the role of labels in superordinate classification. If labels highlight taxonomic relations, then a set of category instances paired with a novel label should serve as an especially effective taxonomic clue. With the introduction of a novel word, 3-year-olds classified as successfully as children provided with known English labels. The powerful relation between language and classification is discussed.

Just what is an op-code?

The following computer architecture offers extensible machine language. That is it has an open-ended instruction set. It does this by using the same format for both op-codes and subroutine calls. Theoretically this means that the programmer can chose an instruction set for the application at hand. Ie., the machine language representation of a program can correspond to a high level textual representation or a program.The mechanism of instruction processing for this architecture is essentially a way of encompassing the major categories of interpreters : Direct threaded code, indirect threaded code, and P-code or compressed threaded code. The mechanism is closest in spirit to that of Forth and can be considered a hardware implementation of Forth.Due to the simplicity of instruction set representation, the design is not tied to any one word size. Thus, it is implementable on all the major word sizes (16, 24, 32, 36, 48, 60, or 64 bits).I hope this is perceived as an elegant design.