The National Research Council Report on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children and the Process of Dubitation

The author examines two significant issues, the adjudication of evidence and the architecture of instruction in the context of research on beginning reading. In particular, he reflects on his participation as a member of the National Research Council's committee that published the recent report entitled Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children (1998). The National Academy of Sciences panel of experts process is contrasted with a more explicit process for codifying scientific evidence and including quantitative experimental research as the primary source of evidence. In addition, the author argues for the importance of attending to the architecture of instruction in beginning reading.     

A History of the Association of Medical School Psychologists

While psychologists have been active faculty members in medical schools for over 85 years, they lacked organization on the national level until 1981. This history traces the background of psychology's involvement in medical schools, landmark events that affected the discipline, and progress since formal organization has occurred. Office of the Senior Vice President and Provost     

Mother Knows Best? Mother and Child Report of Behavioral Difficulties of Children of HIV-Infected Mothers

Children of HIV-infected mothers have more psychosocial adjustment difficulties than do those of noninfected mothers. In this study, child psychosocial adjustment in children of HIV-infected women is examined across the three stages of HIV-infected: asymptomatic, symptomatic and AIDS. Participants were 99 HIV-infected women and 148 noninfected women. Children were not identified as being HIV infected. Mother and child reports of behavioral difficulties are compared, and competing hypotheses about mother report of child behavior difficulties are tested. Results indicate an ascending linear trend for child report of internalizing and externalizing difficulties from the noninfected stage through increasingly severe stages of HIV-infection. According to mother report, child externalizing and internalizing difficulties are nonlinear, as mothers report an increase through the infected symptomatic stage, then a decrease in the AIDS stage. Implications for assessment, prevention and intervention in families with maternal HIV infection are discussed.     

Knowing God directly

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -     

Personal Strategies for HIV Prevention: The Development and Validation of a Strategy-Coding Instrument1

This paper describes the development of a coding instrument to classify college students' strategies for preventing HIV infection, and examines the association of distinct strategies with social cognitive and behavioral measures related to safer sexual behavior. This instrument classifies each strategy into both a content domain (e.g., using condoms, remaining abstinent, limiting sexual partners), and 3 distinct dimensions: commitment, specificity, and effectiveness. We examine the reliability and validity of this instrument by showing the discriminative associations of each dimension with social cognitive and behavioral measures, and demonstrate the differential importance of distinct dimensions in predicting behavior in different content domains. Discussion focuses on the importance of tailoring HIV prevention messages to change strategy dimensions in order to maximize behavior change.     

Contributing to Discourse

For people to contribute to discourse, they must do more than utter the right sentence at the right time. The basic requirement is that they add to their common ground in an orderly way. To do this, we argue, they try to establish for each utterance the mutual belief that the addressees have understood what the speaker meant well enough for current purposes. This is accomplished by the collective actions of the current contributor and his or her partners, and these result in units of conversation called contributions. We present a model of contributions and show how it accounts for a variety of features of everyday conversations.     

Default Probability

A probability may be called “default” if it is neither derived from preestablished probabilities nor based on considerations of frequency or symmetry. Default probabilities presumably arise through reasoning based on causality and similarity. This article advances a model of default probability based on a featural approach to similarity. The accuracy of the model is assessed by comparing its predictions to the probabilities provided by undergraduates asked to reason about mammals.