Professional service involvement of leadership faculty: An assessment of gender,role, and satisfaction

This study explored gender differences among educational administration faculty and their participation in and satisfaction with professional association activities. The study population would be characterized as overwhelmingly male and white, but with women and minority candidates beginning to enter the faculty ranks. Women faculty reported involvement in more professional service activities and a slightly higher satisfaction with their involvement than their male colleagues. However, women participated in different types of and more professional association activities than men.     

The processing of affectively-toned words in incidental learning: a test of differential acquisition and response bias hypotheses.

Differential acquisition of stimulus information and differential response biases have been considered as hypotheses for the processing of affective stimuli in perceptual tasks. The present experiment was designed to assess the value of these hypotheses in the context of recall following incidental learning. During the first two phases of the experiment, 70 undergraduates were led to believe that the investigation was concerned with their efficiency at letter-cancelling. In the first phase, the Ss copied out out a mixed list of good and bad words, twice, as quickly as possible, and then began work on a letter- cancelling task. In the second phase, each S participated in one of five further word- copying conditions, once again completed as quickly as possible and followed by more letter-cancelling. These conditions served to create different degrees of acquisition for the good and bad words or to create suitable controls.Using a new method of analysing recall data, differences between the mean strenghts of the good and bad words were estimated on a logistic scale. Analysis of this data yielded no evidence to support either of the initial hypotheses. Similarities and discrepancies between the present findings and the existing literature are discussed. It is suggested that an advantage in recall for good as against bad words may only emerge ehen Ss allocate additional processing to good words, either through choice or as a consequence of task demands.     

The role of reference in children's acquisition of a miniature artificial language

Nursery school children were presented with a simple miniature artificial language in one of three conditions. In the first, the stimuli to which the words referred contained an inherent lawful relationship and the language syntax reflected this relationship. In the second, the stimuli contained an inherent lawful relationship but the language syntax did not reflect this relationship. In the third, no lawful relationship existed among the stimuli to which the words referred so the language syntax imposed an arbitrary relationship among stimuli. Subjects in the first group were able to produce more correct utterances than those in the other two groups when the stimuli to which the words referred were not present, suggesting that some form of semantic mediation mechanism was being used. Evidence from novel constructions indicates that for both groups using stimuli containing an inherent lawful relation there were interactions between semantic learning mechanisms and syntax learning mechanisms.     

The span of apprehension: Form Identification as a function of amount of information displayed

Observers were asked to identify each member of a brief display of geometrie forms. The information content of the displays was manipulated by varying the number of forms displayed and the number of relevant dimensions of each form. The main findings were: (a) Performance was approximately invariant with the number of forms displayed and depended to a minor degree upon the relevant information in each form. (b) Serial-position curves were obtained that had a strong primacy effect, (c) The number of correct identifications per trial was approximately normally distributed, with greater variance than if the forms were independentlyidentified.These findings are discussed in relation to both “coding rate” and “memory capacity” models of immediate visual memory. Neither model accounts for the data. Undetermined organizational factors are suggested to play a role in immediate visual memory. This task appears to depend upon form Identification processes different from those indicated by RT measures.     

Modality-specific repetition priming of auditory word recognition

Subjects were pretrained on 30 experimental words by matching each to one of three definitions. The pretrained words were presented auditorily, or in their conventional spellings, or phonically misspelt (e.g., LORNE for lawn). The same words were later interleaved randomly with 70 new filler words and presented auditorily in a background of white noise. Only the auditory pretraining led to significantly improved recognition of the experimental words when compared with the recognition scores of a control group of subjects given no form of pretraining.