Test difficulty and judgment bias

Two experiments tested the hypothesis that overconfidence in performance judgments is due to test- and person-driven errors. In Experiment 1, test difficulty accounted for the vast majority of variation in overconfidence when individuals judged items of varying difficulty within a homogeneous test. In Experiment 2, the severity of overconfidence did not differ between three unrelated tests once test difficulty was controlled. Both experiments supported the view that over-confidence is due largely to test difficulty. Some degree of overconfidence also occurred because individuals adopted a normatively high success criterion for judging their own test performance.     

对"橄榄型社会结构"一说的反思

橄榄型社会结构的提法是建立在中产阶级理论的基础之上的.本文对世界三条不同的中产阶级成长之路进行了历史的考察,认为橄榄型社会结构并不符合当代中国的国情,我们无法借鉴;相对于中产阶级,我们更应该正视最广大社会群体的基本诉求.巩固党的执政基础和阶级基础需要我们更重视底层的广大民众,把工人阶级和广大劳动群众作为党执政的根本立足点.因此,造就一个橄榄型社会并不是我们现阶段所要关注的焦点.追求社会的公平正义才是我们党和政府要着手解决的首要问题.     

文明冲突论:被揭示的与被遮蔽的

在20世纪的最后十年即所谓世纪之交,随着中国国内的一场政治地震和苏联解体、东欧剧变带来的东西方冷战体制的崩溃,以美国为首的西方国家与中国之间的"人权斗争"以及相关的经济制裁和政治对立形成了新的大国冲突战线.与此同时,美国率领其盟军在海湾地区制服伊拉克,赢得一场"文明之间的战争"①.     

The Bears Family Projective Test: evaluating stories of children with emotional difficulties

The aim of this study was to describe and analyze the storytelling of children with emotional difficulties. Forty children with emotional and relational difficulties (inhibited and impulsive), ages between 5.5 and 9.4 years old, were assessed by a multiaxial procedure and the bears family projective test. The bears family test is a constructive-thematic-projective method based on an anthropomorphic family of bears that children can manipulate to tell a story. The stories of 40 children without emotional difficulties (matched by IQ, socio-economic status, and gender) and 322 typically developing children, aged between four and 10 years old, were used as a reference for comparisons. Results indicated that the stories of children with emotional difficulties showed many unsolved problematic events, unclear characters, negative relationships, and negative behaviors. Unlike the stories of children without emotional difficulties, positive contents didn't prevail over negative, and there wasn't a positive compensation for negative elements.     

Exposure as a treatment for social phobia: Some instructive difficulties

The main rules guiding the application of exposure to the treatment of simple phobias and agoraphobia are described, together with the four principal difficulties that came to attention when these rules were applied to the treatment of social phobia. These difficulties were: (i) specifying graduated and repeatable tasks; (ii) prolonging exposure; (iii) securing adequate engagement during exposure; and (iv) dealing with the cognitive aspects of social phobia. Solutions to these difficulties are described and illustrated from case material collected during the treatment of 45 socially-phobic out-patients. The discussion considers the implications of these solutions both for the treatment of other conditions and for understanding the processes involved in exposure.     

Paired associate learning: Data on pair difficulty and variables that influence difficulty

Two hundred pairs of five-letter words were produced randomly from all five-letter words in Thorndike and Lorge (1944). The difficulty of each pair was established for paired associate learning by having 50 subjects learn lists of 20 pairs. The difficulty of a pair was found to be highly reliable and was not influenced by the particular list in which it was learned. Frequency of response terms was positively related to learning, but the frequency of the stimulus terms was not. Two-syllable five-letter words were learned more rapidly than one-syllable five-letter words. Two 20-pair lists were constructed, one consisting of homogeneous pairs of average difficulty and the other of 10 very easy pairs and 10 very difficult pairs. As anticipated, performance on the latter list was initially better than that on the former, with the performance on the two lists converging over trials. The difficulty of the pairs as determined by paired associate learning was unrelated to misses on a recognition test, but the false alarms decreased as difficulty decreased.     

对当代佛教教育中“参学”关系的思考

在当代,各主要信仰佛教的国家都办有佛学院和佛教大学,中国也不例外。中国是在清末开始办佛教学校的,但也正是学校教育的缘故,当前的佛教界似乎对"学"很重视,却忽视了佛教传统教育中"参"的重要意义,这也是导致当前我国佛教界世俗之风日盛的一个原因,针对这个问题对当代佛教教育中"参学"关系展开思索。     

Comment on Cameron and Cameron (2002): "children of homosexual parents report childhood difficulties"

Cameron and Cameron's reanalysis of published data in 2002 indicates children being raised in a home environment with at least one homosexual parent report some negative consequences. However, a closer look at the information presented suggests (especially in the absence of control groups) that the negative consequences documented do not constitute major psychological trauma. Rather, they are more in the nature of the teasing and bullying that plagues any child who comes from a home that may be atypical in any fashion.     

A note on "MMPI scale development methodology"

Clopton's recent article (1978) in JPA calls attention to methodological problems in the construction of special inventories from the MMPI pool, but overlooks the major problem. It stems from the theoretical correlation between psychopathology and the construct to be measured by the special inventory. This contamination renders the usual validity demonstration questionable. It is pointed out that there is a good number of special inventories that are not subject to the methodological problems noted by Clopton.     

Order Effects on Situational Judgment Test Items: A case of construct‐irrelevant difficulty

Situational judgment tests (SJTs) pose unique cognitive demands on test takers in that, when presented in written form, they require a great deal of reading and cognitive effort. Because of this cognitive demand, responses to test items toward the end of the test may be influenced by an order effect produced by responding to a large quantity of previous test items. This construct‐irrelevant order effect may increase measurement error and threaten the validity of SJT scores. To test this phenomenon, data were obtained from 1,089 applicants who had completed a lengthy SJT as part of a selection process for an hourly safety and surveillance job at a large international corporation. Results showed that local item dependence, item difficulty, and the rate of omitted responses all increased when items were placed toward the end. The order effect alone was not strong enough to influence subgroup mean score differences in the second half of the test. However, this effect did vary by race: African‐Americans were most strongly affected by the order effect, followed by Caucasians, in their number of omitted responses. Implications and future research of this effect for SJTs and similar types of assessments are discussed.     

Spinoza on Ingenium and Exemplarity: Some Consequences for Educational Theory

Studies in Philosophy and Education - This article turns to the neglected pedagogical concept of ingenium in order to address some shortcomings of the admiration–emulation model of Linda...