National-Level Projection for Elementary School Guidance

This paper offers a series of proposals for furthering the development of elementary school guidance. Certain assumptions underlying future action were stated. In proposing a national-level plan to determine the nature and characteristics of guidance in the elementary school, several possibilities were offered as to organizational plans and leadership responsibility. The main proposal offered in this paper discussed functional operations both in the area of research and experimentation as well as in theory construction. Specific areas of investigation were proposed. A position statement was recommended and several features of such a position statement were suggested.     

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.     

Negatively biased recall in children with self-reported symptoms of depression

This study investigated differences in depressed and nondepressed children's recall of positively and negatively reinforced behavior. Twenty-six children with self-reported symptoms of depression in the fourth through sixth grades were compared with a matched sample of 26 nondepressed children to determine if there was a negative bias in depressed children's recall. Subjects first generated guesses of the most common associations to each of a series of 40 words. Later, when compared with their nondepressed peers, the children with depressive symptomology were less accurate in recalling which words they had answered correctly and remembered fewer of their own correct responses. They also did more poorly when asked to recall the correct answers that had been provided by the investigator. The two groups did not differ, however, in their recall of which items had been answered incorrectly or in their recall of their previous wrong responses. These results suggest that children with self-reported depressive symptomology do not remember negative experiences more than do nondepressed children; rather, they recall positive experiences less well. Selective forgetting of positively reinforced behavior could be a serious handicap for depressed children in school. It could also play an important role in the maintenance and perhaps even the etiology of depressive symptomatology in children.We wish to thank Bruce Compas for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.     

Homosexuality in Biblical Perspective

Homosexuality in Biblical Perspective analyses, in their cultural context, biblical passages on homosexuality. Biblical anthropology did not distinguish between homosexual orientation and behavior. Biblical passages address homosexual behavior of heterosexual persons in cultic contexts, identifying the perpetrators with pagan worship practice, eclipsing their identity as the people of Yahweh. Such behavior is an abomination. The Bible says nothing about the morality of homosexual behavior within a committed and ethical troth relationship such as marriage.     

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.     

The Doctoral Degree in Counselor Education and Supervision

The doctoral degree in Counselor Education and Supervision (CES) is a terminal or final degree in the field of counseling. This article, provides an abbreviated look at the development of the CES doctoral degree, reviews the development of accreditation standards, reports on current status of the doctoral degree, and comments on the possible future of the CES doctoral degree.     

RESPONSE STYLE AND CROSS-CULTURAL COMPARISONS OF RATING SCALES AMONG EAST ASIAN AND NORTH AMERICAN STUDENTS

Abstract— This report examines cross-cultural differences in response style regarding the use of rating scales Subjects were high school students 944 from Sendai (Japan), 1,357 from Taipei (Taiwan), 687 from Edmonton and Calgary (Canada), and 2,174 from the Minneapolis metropolitan area and Fairfax County, Virginia Responses to fifty-seven 7-point Likert-type scales were analyzed The Japanese and Chinese students were more likely than the two North American groups to use the midpoint on the scales, the U S subjects were more likely than the other three groups to use the extreme values Within each cultural group, endorsement of individualism was positively related to the use of extreme values and negatively related to the use of the midpoint These small, albeit statistically significant, differences in response styles generally did not alter cross-cultural comparisons of item means.     

Visual selection mediated by location: Selecting successive visual objects

In these experiments, each stimulus consists of a series of frames, each containing a target digit of one color and a distractor digit of another color. The task is to name the highest digit of the target color. Subjects make fewer errors when successive targets appear at the same location than when they appear at different locations, apparently because they select target objects by using a mechanism that is based on location. When successive targets appear at the same location, there is no need to “move” the selection mechanism to a new location, leaving more time to identify the stimuli. These experiments show that location-based selection is used even though selection by color would be more direct. They also demonstrate a method of measuring location-based selection that can be applied to a variety of visual tasks. Further experiments reveal that although location-based selection is used to identify a digit in the presence of a digit distractor, it is not used to identify a digit in the presence of a letter distractor, suggesting that this selection mechanism is not used in this situation to prevent interference among the basic features making up letters and digits, but to inhibit responses associated with the distractors.