Needed Changes to Sweeten the Impact of Testing

Ignorance on the part of educators about the effects of testing on pupils has an adverse effect on the uses of tests. Two approaches for correcting the situation are proposed: (a) paying more attention to the pupil performance that produces the test scores, and (b) developing closer integration between the testing process and the total educational process. A contrast is drawn between what Piaget calls a measure of “yield” and what he calls “constructive operations,” and the suggestion is made that the latter type of information is accessible from testing. Lip service paid to the idea that “testing is an integral part of education” is insufficient. Testing must be perceived by the test consumer as a form of continuous feedback that is indispensable to the management of learning here and now.     

Sex-Related HIV/AIDS Prevention Among African American College Students: Issues for Preventive Counseling

This study examined condom use during oral and anal sex among 1,593 African American male and female college undergraduates. Findings suggest a high level of concordance between men and women on several measures. However, female participants were more likely to use condoms during oral and anal sex than were male participants.     

Individuation and paideia

This article attempts to discover an important historical precedent for the concept of individuation in the idea of paideia , which today, mistakenly, is often understood to have been simply the form of 'education' practised in ancient Greece. Paideia , however, was not limited to the instruction of youth and was based on no fixed programmes. It was conceived as continuing throughout the life of the individual, and as a development of natural, in-born potential. Paideia articulated a notion of 'inner culture', or cultura animi , which has since receded from Western civilization, with its anti-psychological emphasis on progress, specialization and extra-version, and with its notion that a civilization's 'culture' is primarily defined by its social structures and material tools. Present-day interest in the Jungian concept of individuation can thus be seen as a return of the repressed. An analysis of the Telemachy - the opening cantos of the Odyssey - in which Odysseus' son, Telemachus, accomplishes his passage to adulthood, reveals the need for the realization of natural potential to be an innate and archetypal ideal. Homeric poetry is then seen to have furnished a unified canon for the whole human being, whereas the subsequent course of European civilization, starting with the Greek Sophists and an ever more specialized notion of philosophy, is seen to have fostered a unilateral mode of maturation. It is argued that nostalgia for paideia indirectly reasserts itself through the widespread cultural interest in the idea of individuation.     

Three stages of medical dialogue

The negative consequences of physicians' failure to establish and maintain personal relationships with patients are at the heart of the “humanistic crisis” in medicine. To resolve this crisis, a new model of doctor-patient interaction is proposed, based on the ideas of Martin Buber's philosophy of dialogue. This model shows how the physican may successfully combine the personal (I-Thou) and impersonal (I-It) aspects of medicine in three stages. These “Three Stages of Medical Dialogue” include:

1. An Initial Personal Meeting stage, which initiates the doctor-patient relationship and involves mutual confirmation;
2. An Examination stage, which requires a shift from a personal to an impersonal style of interaction;
3. An Integration Through Dialogue or “Healing Through Meeting’ Stage, which involves the integration of the impersonal medical data into the ongoing dialogue between doctor and patient, as a basis for shared decision-making.

The use of the model, as well as common failures of doctor-patient dialogue are discussed.     

Exploring the Role of Normative-and Performance-Based Feedback in Motivational Processes1

We investigated the role of multiple forms of feedback and of alternative measures of motivation in feedback-goal-performance processes. Results indicated that when performance-based and normative-based feedback are both provided, the two forms of feedback have differential effects on personal goals and intrinsic motivation, supporting our predictions. Moreover, measures of self-efficacy and personal goals worded in relation to performance were more strongly related to performance-based feedback, while self-efficacy and personal goals measures worded in relation to normative information were more strongly related to normative-based feedback, as predicted. These results highlight the importance of investigating more complex feedback environments and examining the role of alternative measures of motivational variables to increase our understanding of motivational processes.     

Radical interpretation and the permutation principle

Davidson has claimed that to conclude that reference is inscrutable, one must assume that If some theory of truth ... is satisfactory in the light of all relevant evidence ... then any theory that is generated from the first theory by a permutation will also be satisfactory in the light of all relevant evidence. However, given that theories of truth are not directly read off the world, but rather serve as parts of larger theories of behavior, this assumption is far from self-evident. A proper understanding of the role truth theories play in theories of interpretation makes the inscrutability of reference much less wide-spread than Davidson suggests, and, as a result, the radical interpretation methodology is much less likely to saddle its defenders with counterintuitive cases of indeterminacy than is commonly supposed.