Research on black women college administrators: Descriptive and interview data

The article summarizes the results of a survey and follow-up interview of black women college administrators, at predominantly white colleges, in selected positions, such as president, vice-president, dean, director, department chairperson, and the assistants and/or associates to the aforementioned positions. The author gives a profile of a middle-management group of women who are at different colleges in the City University of New York system. Also included are a review of the literature and recommendations for both the University and black women seeking careers in college administration.     

Mary McLeod bethune and the education of black girls

Traditional definitions of feminism do not hold for some black women like Mary McLeod Bethune who had to overcome the dual burdens of race and sex in order to build a school for black girls in the racially tense South during the early part of the 20th century. Ever a pragmatist, Bethune seized the opportunity offered by the rhetoric of domesticity and certain stereotypical views of blacks in order to advance the higher cause of uplift and self-sufficiency for black women through education.     

Grading the ‘cultural literacy’ project

The essay examines the argument advanced by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., for instituting ‘cultural literacy’ as a fundamental priority of schools. A number of confusions and equivocations in Hirsch's reasoning are identified, and the propensity of his project to indoctrinate is exposed. Among the features of Hirsch's argument shown to be troubling are his shifting construal of ‘language’, his inconsistency about the requirements of cultural literacy, and his uncritical relation to traditional images of the American past and present. The upshot is to raise the question why Hirsch's project has elicited wide support and praise.     

False recognition of associates: How robust is the effect?

False recognition of nonpresented words that were strong associates of 12 words in a study list was examined. Six lists were read to subjects; each list contained the 12 strongest associates to a critical nonpresented word. False-alarm rates to the 6 critical nonpresented words were obtained under several different conditions. The manipulations included varying the level of processing done to the study lists, varying the recognition-test procedure, repeating each of the study lists three times, and mixing the words from the six study lists together. A reliable false-recognition effect for critical nonpresented words was obtained in all conditions. However, the effect was not impervious to all of the manipulations. Significantly lower false recognition was obtained when learning was incidental as well as when the words on the six lists were mixed together. Neither level of processing nor repetition significantly influenced false recognition. This last result is inconsistent with Hintzman’s (1988) MINERVA 2 global memory model, but agrees with predictions from Shiffrin, Ratcliff, and Clark’s (1990) SAM model.     

Referenzsemantik in der Partnermodellierung

How can we explain that an assertion on something perceived can be understood in the same manner by somebody who cannot perceive that scene? This problem bases the interest in computational linguistics in how listener modeling could possibly be harmonized with reference semantics. Mental images substituting real perception appear as a way out. The architecture of the listener model has to be adapted to the creation and use of such pictorial data structures. Furthermore, the relation between the latter and a verbal (i. e., propositional) representation must be understood. The resulting architecture of a listener model with reference semantics can be employed to solve communicational problems from three general classes in a better way, as is demonstrated by an example implementation.