Does guidance have a future?: Notes towards a distinctive position

Recent developments have raised questions about the distinctiveness of guidance and whether its practice can be separated from that of related professions. Those developments are reviewed. It is suggested that a distinctive position may be found by an examination of certain key features of guidance practice. One of these features is the role of information. Information is distinguished from informing. Its nature is discussed, as is its use in practice by both clients and guidance practitioners.     

Genetic Counseling: Clinical Geneticists' Views

Evaluation of genetic counseling requires a clear consensus about its objectives, which is not evident in published definitions and guidelines. This study aims to investigate clinical geneticists' beliefs and thoughts about their practice. Structured interviews with eight clinical geneticists addressed the aims, skills, and expectations of genetic counseling. Analysis of transcribed interviews revealed four key themes, with contradictory aspects: 1. Providing information that is objective, full, and accurate versus information that is contingent on circumstances and tailored to individual needs. 2. Eliciting emotion and dealing with it directly versus dampening down and containing emotion. 3. Communicating nondirectively versus directively. 4. Expecting to perform a range of sophisticated tasks while having minimal training in the necessary skills to achieve these. These results have implications for the nature of the professional role, the development of training required for it, and the evaluation of genetic counseling.     

The Behavioral Context of Strategic Choice in Negotiation: A Test of the Dual Concern Model1

The dual concern model of negotiation predicts behavioral approaches from an analysis of negotiators' motives. Previous studies of the model have shown support, but only under conditions where negotiators' motivationally prescribed behavior was the same. The present study was designed to examine the impact of several different behavioral contexts. Undergraduate students read conflict scenarios in which their concern for self and other, and the behavior of the other party were manipulated. Support for the dual concern model was found when the opponent's behavior was identical to the negotiator's own motivation-ally prescribed behavior. Across most conditions, a behavioral matching hypothesis provided a better explanation. However, interactions between motivational orientation and behavioral context suggest that negotiators' behavior may be best predicted through a combination of motivational and matching models.     

Reading disability and the differential ability scales

This study contrasted the performance on the Differential Abilities Scales (DAS) of a carefully selected sample of reading-disabled children with a matched control group of children from the standardization sample. It was hypothesized that patterns on the DAS might be similar to those found on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised and on the British Abilities Scales (BAS). The results suggest that reading-disabled children as a group do demonstrate a characteristic profile on the DAS. They score relatively poorly on the achievement tests and on two of the three diagnostic tests, Recall of Digits and Recall of Objects. The one exception to complete profile similarity between the DAS and the BAS was Speed of Information Processing. In the present study, low scores on Speed of Information Processing did not characterize the reading-disabled children as a whole but did characterize a subgroup of reading-disabled children. Clusters of reading-disabled children were generated from the data, and specific profiles of subgroups of children are presented.     

Preparation of school psychologists for school-based consultation: A training activity and a service to community schools

Presents a set of training experiences to develop school-based consultation skills in preservice school psychologists and discusses problems in implementing this model of service. Based on their experience in training school psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley, the authors report on preparing students to deal with teacher and principal expectations. Also discussed are methods for mobilizing teachers to plan more precisely to meet the needs of individual pupils in the classroom. A distinction is made in the paper between school-based and community-based mental health consultation.     

Semantic components in children's errors with pronouns

In the presence of the experimenter and two dolls, children were asked to respond to sentences containing pronous which required distinctions to be made on the basis of person, number, and gender, such as “Point tomy (your, his, her, our, their) feet.” Errors tended to maintain distinctions; for example,we was treated as if it meantI (maintaining first person) orthey (maintaining plural) more often than could be accounted for by a response-bias model. Furthermore, there were consistent individual differences in the kinds of distinctions that were difficult; some subjects has more trouble with number, others with person. These findings support the notion that errors made during acquisition result from dropping only part of the correct meaning, and they suggest that individuals may differ in the relative strengths of different components.     

On-line,real-time recording of eye orientation using the corneal reflection method

The orientation of a subject’s eyes can be automatically sampled in real time at 60 Hz using Mackworth’s corneal reflection method, a closed circuit TV system with a brightness-amplitude trigger, and a minicomputer. The organization of the electronic interface and software (for recording and behavioral control) is described, along with the characteristics of the recording system and potential sources of artifact. Sample calibration and experimental data are presented.     

Deviant behaviors in rural elementary schoolchildren

A sample of 1567 third- and fourth-grade children in rural Illinois were rated on the Behavior Problem Checklist. The mean frequency of conduct problems, inadequacy-immaturity, personality problems, and socialized delinquency were analyzed by grade, sex, and age. Fourth graders and older children tended to have more problems than did third graders and younger children. Boys had more problems than did girls except on the personality-problem dimension.