Sentence Stem Research Articles

Identification of Sentence Stems Characteristic of Chinese Learner English Writing

Phraseological units in academic English texts have been a central focus in recent corpus linguistic research. This paper describes a special category of clause-level phraseological units, namely, Characteristic Sentence Stems (CSSs), with a view to describing their identifying criteria and their extraction method. CSSs are contiguous lexico-grammatical sequences which contain a subject-predicate structure and which are frame expressions characteristic of academic writing. The extraction method of a CSS consists of six steps: POS tagging, n-gram segmentation, structure identification, significance of occurrence calculation, text range calculation, and overlapping sequence reduction. The significance of occurrence calculation is the crux of this method. It includes the computing of both the internal association and the boundary independence of a CSS, and it tests the occurring significance of the CSS from both the inside and the outside perspectives. Our methods and results suggest that CSSs can be statistically defined and extracted from corpora and can employed in large-scale studies to more fully account for the phraseological features of non-native English academic writing.

Sentence Completion as a User Experience Research Method: Recommendations From an Experimental Study

Abstract The aim of this study is to investigate the use of the sentence completion technique (SCT) as a user experience (UX) research method. We conducted an online experiment (N = 400) to test the effect of sentence stem variations on sentence completion outcomes. Using a between-subjects design, half of the participants were exposed to impersonal sentence stems that did not include pronouns while the other half were exposed to stems formulated using first-person pronouns (PR). Additional hypotheses around stem formats (use of redundant stems, imaginative stems, two blanks stems, generic stems, stems prompting others’ perception) were tested using a within-subject design. The results do not support hypothesized differences between the pronoun and no pronoun condition. Findings however show that varying the format of the stem influences response behavior, as measured by variety, quantity and novelty of ideas, as well as the length of response. This study contributes to consolidating the use of SCT as a user research method and proposes actionable recommendations on how to create optimal sentence completion surveys in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).

How grade levels shape underperforming elementary student preferences about learning mathematics in the classroom

There is evidence that student attitudes towards mathematics become more negative as students move through their schooling. However, less is known about the different factors that shape student attitudes at various stages. This qualitative study sought to shed light on this issue and consider how stage of schooling influenced self-perceived supports for what helped underperforming students to learn mathematics. One hundred and seventy-nine students in Grades 2/3 and 5/6 completed a questionnaire before they participated in a mathematics intervention program, targeting students who had fallen behind in mathematics. Participating students were asked to complete the sentence stem. The best thing about learning mathematics in my classroom is … and answered the question: What helps you learn mathematics in the classroom? Thematic analysis revealed that the majority of younger students emphasized specific tasks (e.g. games) and mathematical content areas (e.g. counting) when describing the best thing about learning mathematics at school and were twice as likely to highlight such aspects compared with older students. By contrast, older students were far more likely to indicate the importance of being supported directly by their teacher or peers when learning mathematics, compared with younger students.

The subjective feeling of a gap between conceptual and perceptual fluency is interpreted as a metacognitive signal of pastness.

The present study aimed to address the following question: does the discrepancy between an expected word and its readability enhances or impair its memorability? We used an adaptation of the sentence stem paradigm (Whittlesea in J Exp Psycol 19:1235-1253, 1993) and manipulated the perceptual clarity of the words by introducing some Gaussian noise (Reber in Psycol Sci 9:45-48, 1998). The target words were semantically predictable or otherwise (conceptual fluency) or were easy or difficult to read (perceptual fluency). The first experiment was conducted to ensure that the two manipulated factors had an impact on the readability of the words. In particular, results showed that when the words were written against a noisy background their predictability enhanced the judgement of readability. The second experiment aimed to test the hypothesis that recognition would be influenced by the discrepancy between conceptual and perceptual fluency. The results showed that with a noisy background, the predictability of the target words had an impact on recognition judgement; with a clear background, the effect on the recognition judgement was caused by the non-predictability of the target words. Conversely, confidence in judgement increased when the two factors went in the same direction, that is, predictability with clarity and non-predictability with low clarity. The results showed that (a) depending on the task, the effects of conceptual and perceptual fluency did not go in the same direction; (b) the kinds of fluency (conceptual and perceptual) were not independent; and (c) recognition judgements were affected by the gap between conceptual and perceptual fluency.

An emotion-eliciting version of the Hayling Sentence Completion Test

ABSTRACT Introduction Executive functions comprise a suite of higher-order cognitive processes, which interact with other processes, such as emotion, to drive goal-directed behavior. The Hayling Sentence Completion Test is a widely used standard neuropsychological tool to measure executive functions, namely verbal initiation and suppression. The current studies aimed to establish and validate an emotion-eliciting version of the Hayling Sentence Completion Test, in order to examine the executive processes of initiation and suppression in an emotional context. Study 1 aimed to provide a quantitative evaluation of the emotional content of the Emotional Hayling Test. Study 2 investigated the differences between the Standard and Emotional Hayling Tests, and explored how performance relates to specific emotional properties of the sentences within the Emotional Hayling. Methods Study 1 included N = 100 participants, who were asked to rate each Emotional Hayling Sentence stem in terms of valence (pleasant-unpleasant) and arousal (intensity: low-high). Study 2 included N = 204 participants who completed the Emotional Hayling Test, along with other neuropsychological measures of cognitive and affective functioning. Results As designed, the sentence stimuli in the Emotional Hayling were rated as significantly higher in absolute emotional valence and arousal, compared to the Standard Hayling (Study 1). Overall, initiation and suppression on the Emotional Hayling were significantly poorer than on the Standard Hayling (Study 2). Finally, within the Emotional Hayling, participants made more suppression errors in response to negative sentences compared to positive sentences, and this effect was present in younger but not older adults. Conclusions Reduced performance on the Emotional Hayling Test, particularly in response to negative sentences, is consistent with the emotional content placing increased demands on the executive function system. We present the Emotional Hayling Test as a promising clinical tool, with the potential to capture disruptions in emotional processing.

Sentence Stems to Foster Dialogue: Uses of “I Notice” and “I Wonder” in Online Teacher Professional Development

In this article, we examine the promise of a popular set of sentence stems, “I notice” and “I wonder,” for fostering productive discussion in an online course for teachers. Drawing on teachers’ responses to one another’s classroom reflections, we look for evidence regarding how course prompts encouraging teachers to use these stems influence the types of contributions teachers offer. We analyze teachers’ responses at the module, response, and sentence level, situating our inquiry in the context of common challenges related to discourse in teacher professional learning contexts. Our findings suggest that prompting teachers to report what they “notice” and what they “wonder” may support the development of teachers’ professional vision and exposure to diverse perspectives.

When the sense of fluency triggers an attentional bias.

Spatial attention can be captured automatically by an exogenous stimulus (e.g., digital interruption) or by an endogenous stimulus (e.g., valence of the stimulus). In this study, we investigated whether a non-perceptual characteristic (e.g., sense of fluency) has an impact on attention. To this end, we used the conceptual fluency paradigm developed by Whittlesea combined with the dot-probe task developed by MacLeod et al. In three experiments, we measured the response times for each experimental situation (i.e., Valid and Non-valid situations). At each trial, participants were presented in three consecutive displays on a screen: (1) an incomplete and predictive sentence stem; (2) a pair of words, one of which was semantically compatible with the previous sentence stem; and (3) a circle appeared at the spatial location of one of the words. Then, participants had to perform a Go (i.e., a filled circle) and No-go (i.e., an empty circle) task. The analysis found that response times were significantly faster when the Go stimulus appeared at the same location as the semantically compatible word (i.e., Valid situations). Overall, our results show that the sense of fluency triggers attentional capture. Thus, they replicate those of Gardner et al. using another experimental paradigm. Our finding might be helpful to better understand the consequences of digital interruptions on behavioural performance.

See-Related Directive Sentence Stems in English Research Articles: Forms and Functions

See-Related Directive Sentence Stems in English Research Articles: Forms and Functions

A Contrastive Study of Self-Sourced Reporting Sentence Stems in English and Chinese Journal Articles

A Contrastive Study of Self-Sourced Reporting Sentence Stems in English and Chinese Journal Articles

The Development and Content Validation of the Care Partner Hospital Assessment Tool.

Background/Objectives: When aging adults are hospitalized due to a major health event, they often turn to care partners (‘family members or friends’) for support. Assessment of care partners’ needs during hospital care may be important to inform and target information and skills training that will equip them to fulfill caregiving tasks for the aging adults. The objectives of this study were to develop and complete content validation of the Care Partner Hospital Assessment Tool (CHAT). Methods: Based on standard instrumentation methodology and an assessment framework recommended by the National Center on Caregiving at the Family Caregiving Alliance, three steps were followed to develop and validate CHAT: (1) generation of a 24-item tool grouped into three content domains (background, plans and preferences, skills and supports), and a survey by a multidisciplinary team, (2) administration of an online survey of care partners and experts, and (3) assessment of item and scale-content validity indices (I-CVI and S-CVI). Results: A total of four care partners that provide unpaid care to a family member or friend age 65 years or older with a chronic illness or disability either before or after a hospitalization, and 19 leading experts in gerontology, caregiving, and health services completed an online survey in English. Twenty-two items were accepted by having an I-CVI at or above the acceptable 78% cut point; the S-CVI for the tool was 85%. Most revisions to the tool were associated with modifying or clarifying language within each item. For example, participants shared the following open-ended suggestions for revising CHAT: (1) change the “do you prefer” sentence stem to “do you want” (n = 12), define “training” (n = 6), and (2) allow care partners to provide an unsure response (n = 5). Conclusion: CHAT may be a promising way to increase health care practitioner’s understanding of care partners’ backgrounds, preferences and plans, and potential information or training needs during a patient’s hospital stay. Initial evaluation of CHAT reveals strong conceptual development and content validity.

The influence of contextual constraint on verbal selection mechanisms and its neural correlates in Parkinson's disease.

A small number of studies have described verbal selection deficits in Parkinson's disease (PD) when selection must occur among competing alternatives. However, these studies have largely focused on single-word processing, or have utilised sentence stems that carry high contextual constraint, thus reducing selection demands. The present study aimed to determine the influence of variable contextual constraint on the selection of a verbal response in PD. This was achieved using an adaption of the Hayling Sentence Completion Task whereby PD participants and matched controls were required to provide a single word to complete a cloze probability sentence stem that carried a low, medium, or high degree of contextual constraint. Results revealed no main effect of group in terms of response time or accuracy, though a group-by-condition interaction in accuracy was noted. This was characterised by a significant difference in accuracy between low and medium levels of constraint for control participants, but no significant difference for the PD group. Functional MRI data revealed marked between-group differences in underlying neural activity. The control group showed increased recruitment of the dorsal striatum and the vlPFC under conditions that placed greater demands upon selection (i.e. low and medium constraint), and greater activity overall in the left dlPFC and right vlPFC. However, in the PD group, behavioural performance appeared to be maintained despite underlying decreases in frontostriatal activity, suggesting other compensatory mechanisms that may include changes in functional connectivity or an over-medication effect in frontal networks in response to loss of signalling in cortico-subcortical pathways.

Projective tests as indicators of life history strategy: Evidence using Loevinger’s sentence completion test

Life history strategy represents individual variation in the degree to which bioenergetic resources are allocated toward growth, maintenance, and reproduction. Individual differences in life history strategies are thought to underlie many of the individual differences studied in Psychology. It was hypothesized that responses on the Sentence Completion Test of Ego Development are partially reflective of an individual’s life history strategy. This hypothesis was tested in three studies, each representing a different level of analysis. The results of Study 1 suggest near unity between ego-level and life history strategy at the conceptual level. In Study 2 a moderate association between rated ego-level and rated life history strategy was found. Additional analyses showed that this association remained when controlling for verbal IQ and that developmental change in each construct was correlated. In Study 3, it was found that responses to the sentence stems could be used directly to assess life history strategy. Combined, the results add to the evidence that responses on projective tests using a sentence stem format are associated with life history strategy. Future research could focus on identifying and constructing sentence stems that provide the maximum information about an individual’s life history strategy.

Sentence Stems That Support Reading Comprehension

AbstractSentence stems are widely used by teachers, but what do we know about developing sentence stems and using them effectively? Sentence stems are intended to facilitate students’ participation in academic conversations and writing and support students to develop the language expected in school, but sometimes the stems do not provide the support intended. The authors explain how to develop supportive sentence stems.

Sexual Communication Through 5 Senses and Sexual Sentence Stems

Objective: AIM: The primary goal of this paper is to examine further the relationship between sexual communication and sexual satisfaction .This research contributes to the clinical sexology literature on this topic in three ways. First, it investigates the relationship between sexual communication and sexual satisfaction using qualitative analysis from several case studies. Second, it introduces a treatment tool, Sexual Sentence Stems (SSS), which can be utilized for working with couples and individuals to improve their sexual communication skills. Finally, it applies this tool with several diverse couples in sex therapy and evaluates its effectiveness.

Popular Conceptions of Mindfulness: Awareness and Emotional Control

Mindfulness has become a fixture of both clinical treatment and popular culture. Much research and theoretical scholarship have operationalized “mindfulness” as clinicians use the term, yet no research has examined popular (i.e., lay) conceptions of mindfulness. Mindfulness trainings and interventions are now widely offered on college campuses. Thus, as a starting point for assessing lay conceptions of the construct, we examined how undergraduate college students at an urban university (N = 361) conceptualize mindfulness. In open-ended responses, participants linked mindfulness to awareness of external objects, internal sensations, or being in the present moment. When rating sentences on how well they represented mindfulness, participants strongly associated mindfulness with controlling emotions. In both the open-ended and sentence stem responses, mindfulness was rarely associated with psychological acceptance, which is notable because of the importance of acceptance in mindfulness-based clinical treatments. Implications and future directions are discussed.

Effects in production of word pre-activation during listening: are listener-generated predictions specified at a speech-sound level?

It has been demonstrated that listener-generated predictions of upcoming material can be specified to a phonological level, such that a specific word onset is anticipated (e.g., DeLong, Urbach, & Kutas, Nature Neuroscience, 8, 1117-1121, 2005). In the present study, we investigated whether such word-form-specific predictions impact picture-naming latencies in a manner similar to that observed when a distractor word is actually presented. Participants were auditorily presented with high-cloze sentence stems, in order to elicit word-form predictions. The pictures for naming were presented immediately following the sentence stem. We systematically manipulated the phonological relationship between the predicted word and the picture name. Across three experiments, naming was facilitated when the picture name fully matched the predicted word. However, naming was neither facilitated nor inhibited when the picture name overlapped phonologically with the predicted word. This finding is in contrast to the knowneffects of phonological overlap when a distractor word is heard or read. Our findings suggest that words that are internally listener-generated (predicted) during comprehension are not robustly specified at a speech-sound (phonological) level.

“I am not a skinny toothpick and proud of it”: Latina adolescents’ ethnic identity and responses to mainstream media images

Using a quasi-experimental design, 118 Latina girls, ages 13–18, viewed five color photographs of White women. Girls viewed either images of sexualized women or images of non-sexualized women. After viewing the images, girls were asked to complete the sentence stem, “I am…” 20 times. Thirty percent of girls spontaneously described their ethnicity in one of their sentence completions. Spontaneous use of ethnicity was taken as an indicator of the salience of ethnic identity. Among girls who viewed sexualized, thin-ideal White media images, spontaneously using an ethnic descriptor was related to more positive descriptions of one's own body and appearance. Analyses supported the premise that ethnic identity may act as a protective factor, buffering Latina girls from the negative effects of viewing sexualized, thin-ideal White media images.

The Sentence Stem Technique: An Innovative Interaction Between Counselor and Client

This column is designed to underscore relationally based creative interventions used by counselors and psychotherapists in their practices. Our intention is to provide examples of novel, innovative ways of working with clients in their efforts to deepen self-awareness and their connections with others. Although the interventions within this column will be presented in a linear “how-to” manner, an essential premise of this column is that interventions submitted for publication have a contextual and relational basis. Basic to this column is the therapeutic focus of working through latent hurts and impediments to our clients' health and happiness. Client goals generally involve creating the requisite emotional space needed for genuine relational choice for connection to manifest. If you have created a useful therapy tool, or if you have adapted an existing creative tool that you would like to share with readers, please follow submission guidelines in the author information packet available at http://www.creativecounselor.org/Journal.html The Sentence Stem Technique (SST) was developed as a subjective tool to assess client attitudes on 30 items expected to elicit an emotional response. The SST is designed to assist the counselor in evaluating client attitudes and in clarifying attitudinal change between the first and subsequent administrations. Proper use and limitations of the SST are noted within the manuscript.

Simple check list for making test item.

Content No. 1 2 3 4 5 1 Is the level of item interpretation or problem-solving? 2 Are the phenomena, observation, experiment, case or multimedia included? 3 Is an answer possible without options? 4 Is the item written as a positive sentence? 5 Is number of options five if it is an A-type item? 6 Is it a “one best answer” item, such as A-type or R-type? 7 Are the options organized on equal levels or in equal categories? 8 Are the lengths of options similar? If not, are they arranged from short to long? Total score When medical teachers make an test item for medical classes, the commonly found errors are: violation of the “off the option” rule, reverse sequence of the clinical situation, and a violation of a “one best answer” question, such as the K-type (complex item format). The “off the option” rule means that examiners should be able to answer without options. For example, a negative sentence stem or a “which is the best answer” question without any cases or data is not possible to answer without options. A reverse sequence item means that the question does not keep the naturally occurring sequence of the clinical situation. If a patient visits doctor and complains of cough, the doctor usually suspects respiratory diseases, takes a history, and performs a physical examination and other diagnostic procedures to detect the cause of the cough. In this situation, the patient does not ask the doctor, “My disease is tuberculosis; do you know what my major complaint is?” The question should be, “What is the next step to diagnose or manage the patient?” A reverse sequence question is the former item. K-type items should not be presented to medical students. This kind of item has already been excluded from the Korean Medical Licensing Examination, because it is the “true or false” type. Only A-type and R-type are presented now [1]. To remove these three commonly found errors and better prepare items that can be presented in clinical situations, I propose a simple checklist for item preparation(Table 1). I hope that it is used commonly to design items. Please check if the item is suitable for the content: If “Yes,” mark 1, and if “No,” mark 0. Add the total score. If total score is less than eight, please revise stem and/or options so that the item format improves.

Indirect measurement of dysfunctional attitudes in bipolar affective disorder

The present study uses an indirect measure to explore whether dysfunctional attitudes are characteristic of all phases of bipolar disorder. Previous studies with bipolar patients using indirect measurements have uncovered depression-like responses that were otherwise undetected. A cross-sectional study design was adopted to explore the presence of dysfunctional attitudes within each phase of the illness. Manic patients, depressed bipolar patients, remitted bipolar patients, and healthy controls were compared on a sentence stem completion task designed to implicitly assess dysfunctional attitudes. The manic, depressed, and remitted patients all exceeded the controls on implicit measures of dysfunctional attitudes. The findings are consistent with the hypothesis that all phases of bipolar disorder are associated with depressogenic dysfunctional attitudes.