Reliability and validity of a twelve-minute walking test for coronary heart disease patients

This study examined the reliability and validity of a 12-min. walking test for coronary heart disease patients. CHD patients (28 men, 18 women) were recruited out of 86 CHD patients of the Martini Hospital Groningen, The Netherlands. 46 CHD patients (age M=66.0 yr., SD=6.8) participated in the reliability study and 24 (age M=62.0 yr., SD=9.2) in the validity study. A test-retest analysis showed a satisfactory Bland-Altman plot and an intraclass coefficient of .98. The Pearson correlation between the score on the test and the VO2 peak was .77. This test gives a reliable and valid assessment of cardiorespiratory fitness of CHD patients.     

The impact of television,print, and audio on children's recall of the news.

Recent research has shown that children remember more from television news than from print news, a finding that has been explained by the extra mnemonic support offered by redundant television pictures (the dual‐coding hypothesis). The present study was designed to examine three alternative explanations, which attribute children's superior recall of television news to (a) underutilization of the print medium, (b) a recall advantage of listening compared with reading, and imperfect reading ability. A sample of 192 fourth and sixth graders was presented with children's news stories, either in (a) their original television form, (b) a bare print version, a print version supplemented with photo material or in (d) an audio version. Results indicated that the television presentation was remembered better than any of the other three versions. The results of the study were consistent with the dual‐coding hypothesis, whereas no support was found for the alternative explanations tested in the study.