An evaluation of story grammars

We evaluate the “story grammar” approach to story understanding from three perspectives. We first examine the formal properties of the grammars and find only one to be formally adequate. We next evaluate the grammars empirically by asking whether they generate all simple stories and whether they generate only stories. We find many stories that they do not generate and one major class of nonstory that they do generate. We also evaluate the grammars' potential as comprehension models and find that they would add nothing to semantic models that focus on the story content. Hence we advocate a story content oriented approach to studying story understanding instead of the structural story grammar approach.     

An evaluation of preemployment drug testing

As part of a blind longitudinal study, 5,465 job applicants were tested for use of illicit drugs, and the relationships between these drug-test results and absenteeism, turnover, injuries, and accidents on the job were evaluated. After an average 1.3 years of employment, employees who had tested positive for illicit drugs had an absenteeism rate 59.3% higher than employees who had tested negative (6.63% vs. 4.16% of scheduled work hours, respectively). Employees who had tested positive also had a 47% higher rate of involuntary turnover than employees who had tested negative (15.41% vs. 10.51%, respectively). No significant associations were detected between drug-test results and measures of injury and accident occurrence. The practical implications of these results, in terms of economic utility and prediction errors, are discussed.     

Adlerian family counseling: An evaluation

Abstract

A number of studies have been reported recently evaluating the effects of one or another form of intervention based on Adlerian principles (Freeman, 1975; Croake and Burness, 1976; Berrett, 1975; McKay, 1976; see also McDonough, 1976, for a review of other studies). Unfortunately, there are a number of problems in attempting to draw any general conclusions from these studies. First, a number of different types of Adlerian-based programs have been included, such as mother study groups, undefined parent study groups, and so on. Second, many of the studies were uncontrolled so that statements regarding the causes of any changes cannot be inferred. Third, many of the studies did not utilize adequate measures of child behavior (positive changes in which are an important goal of Adlerian family education programs), and instead relied on changes in parent attitudes.     

An evaluation of reality orientation therapy

An evaluation was made of reality orientation therapy utilizing 14 male patients with dementias of various types. The therapy is designed to improve memory and reduce confusion in elderly and demented individuals. Utilizing a group comparison with crossover design, it was found that the patients improved significantly over sessions on orientation items actually taught during those sessions. However, no significant improvement was found on a series of generalization items consisting of orientation-related questions that were not asked during sessions. Furthermore, there was no generalization to ward activities. It was noted that individual responses to the treatment were quite varied, and so three cases reflecting highly different responses are presented.Indebtedness is expressed to the Veterans Administration for support of this research.     

An experimental evaluation of school social work

The main results of the Central Lancashire Family and Community Project are reported. The project extended from 1965 to 1973 and attempted to determine experimentally the value of social work undertaken in secondary schools. Significant reductions in juvenile maladjustment and misbehaviour, both short- and long-term, were achieved. While children sent to court showed some behavioural improvement, this was accompanied by a deterioration in measures of adjustment; whereas treatment of a matched sample by school social workers was associated with sustained improvement both in behaviour and in test measures of social adjustment. The school setting was shown to have impeded the workers in a variety of ways: teachers' judgements of what were suitable cases to refer were biassed towards certain kinds of behaviour, and the teachers expected the social workers to achieve unrealistically rapid behavioural improvement. There was also pressure upon the workers to over-identify with the school, its ethos and its staff, and to become too generously involved in school activities, which interfered with their relationships with the children and the time available for social work — especially home visiting. These handicaps, however, were more than offset by the advantages of the school setting in aiding the identification of needy cases at an early stage in the development of their problems, and in undertaking sustained, beneficial casework Furthermore, there were indications that the presence of the worker in itself tended to change the ethos of the school.     

An evaluation of time-sample measures of behavior

Continuous and time-sample measures of the in-seat behavior of a secretary were obtained. Measurement error, i.e., the extent to which the sample measures deviated from the continuous measure, was a function of the frequency of the sample measurements and the criterion used to score an example of the behavior. If the behavior had to be exhibited throughout the observational interval (whole-interval time sampling), there was a consistent underestimate of the continuous measure. If the behavior had to be exhibited only briefly within the observational interval (partial-interval time sampling), there was a consistent overestimate of the continuous measure. And, if the behavior had to be exhibited at the end of the observational interval (momentary time sampling), overestimations and underestimations of the continuous measure occurred about equally often. As expected, the more frequently the sample measures were made the closer was the agreement between the sample and continuous measures. Two conclusions concerning measurement error in interval time sampling were made. The first was that the error will be a function of the mean time per response. The second is that this error will not be consistent across experimental conditions.     

An evaluation of a community outreach program

A contact and counseling service for youth was examined with regard to the awareness of the program and its nature, the utilization of it, and the evaluation of it by the population of youth at risk. The program was evaluated both by a novel, unobtrusive approach to data-collection for use in a milieu where conventional methods were inoperable, and by an analysis of records from the agency. In addiction, process and activity observations of staff and clients were found to be useful for the evaluation of the agency's activities. The results indicated high levels of consumer awareness, mixed levels of utilization, positive evaluation, and an appropriate perception of goals and activities by the potential and actual users.     

An evaluation of dual-process theories of reasoning

Current theories propose that reasoning comprises two underlying systems (Evans & Over, 1996; Sloman, 1996; Stanovich & West, 2000). The systems are identified as having functionally distinct roles, differ according to the type of information encoded, vary according to the level of expressible knowledge, and result in different responses. This article evaluates the arguments and the evidence from a select number of key tasks that have been supportive of dual-reasoning theorists' proposals. The review contrasts the dualist approach with a single-system framework that conjectures that different types of reasoning arise through the graded properties of the representations that are utilized while reasoning, and the different functional roles that consciousness has in cognition. The article concludes by arguing in favor of the alternative framework, which attempts to unify thedifferent forms of reasoning identified by dual-process theorists under a single system.     

An evaluation of human act generation performance

Act generation is important in decision making in ill-defined problems where the subject must synthesize actions that might solve the problem. Two experiments explored human abilities to generate actions which might solve ill-defined decision problems. Subjects were given unlimited time to suggest as many solutions as possible. Their suggestions were compared to a hierarchical structural model of the actions developed by the experimenters that could be taken to solve the problem. Although subjects were capable of generating several actions that might be worth taking, their suggestions were far from complete. The second experiment replicated and extended these results by introducing instructions to generate quality actions. It employed a structural model derived from cluster analysis, an improved utility estimation technique, and offered substantial monetary incentives for quality or quantity of actions generated. This study confirmed the general conclusion that subjects fail to generate important high-utility actions. The implications of this result are discussed in respect to decision analysis in which a complete structural model of the decision problem is highly desirable.