Guidance in a New Ancient Land

The Republic of China is developing its guidance programs energetically and rapidly. The Chinese Guidance Association, a young but vigorous professional association, is devoted to research and development of China's student and industrial personnel programs. This APGA sister association has taken long strides ahead in the past eight years through organization of experimental school and college guidance programs, counselor education, development of tests, and distribution of vocational information materials. It has an ambitious and promising “five-year development plan” blocked out for the period 1966–71.     

The Development and Evaluation of a Measure of Counselor Effectiveness

The purpose of this research was to construct and evaluate a measure for assessing counselor-trainee effectiveness. An eight-category rating instrument was constructed and two standardized interview situations emphasizing problems commonly encountered by secondary school counselors were developed. The standardized interview situations provided by the use of coached counselees permitted a panel of six trained judges to evaluate via closed-circuit television 30 counselor-trainees under conditions designed to insure comparability and, hence, fair appraisal. Using a definition of reliability as the degree of consistency between judges, the average correlation between ratings given by pairs of independent raters was .50. It was concluded that the rating instrument developed and the techniques employed for its use constituted a usable, realistic measure for assessing the counseling proficiency of counselor-trainees.     

Development of a Scale of Attitudes Toward School Guidance

This paper reports the development of two alternate forms of a scale for measuring attitudes toward school guidance programs. The resulting instrument features a high degree of usability, since it can be easily self-administered in less than five minutes without the necessity for timing or oral directions. The entire questionnaire appears on a single sheet of paper which the subject also uses to record his responses. Scoring and interpretation are likewise outstandingly simple. Preliminary studies indicate that the scale shows promise of possessing satisfactory technical characteristics.     

Superior Students' Occupational Preferences and Their Fathers' Occupations

The relationship between the occupational preferences of 147 superior students and their fathers' occupations was traced over the 4-year period that the students attended high schools in Wisconsin. Analysis of the data indicated that both male and female superior students tended to state vocational preferences at the professional level early in high school and to maintain this preference throughout. Their occupational preferences were generally at a higher level than those of their fathers. There was no trend away from general preferences for work at a professional level toward naming of specific occupations within that level. The results suggest that theories of vocational development that imply that stages are passed through during later adolescent periods do not apply to the superior student population of this study.     

Oculomotor adaptation to wedge prisms with no part of the body seen

When S looks at a visual target through prisms, adaptive shifts in reaching behavior occur even though he sees no part of his body through the prisms. These shifts are caused by a change in the judgment of the direction of gaze (oculomotor change), which in turn is caused by two secondary prismatic effects: (a) asymmetry of the visual display and (b) apparent rotation about a vertical axis of a panel or wall facing S. The “asymmetry” factor contributes 22% of the total oculomotor change, and the “rotation” effect contributes the remaining 78%. Oculomotor change is not facilitated by eye-movement activity. The adaptive oculomotor change induces a non-adaptive proprioception change about one-tenth as large as the oculomotor change. These findings are capable of accounting for the previously unexplained results reported by Wooster in 1923, and also for the current controversy about the role of reafferent stimulation in sensorymotor adaptation.     

Further experiments on movement masking

Voluntary attention to one of two static objects in the peripheral field of one eye makes this object more liable to masking by a moving object in the corresponding area of the field of the other eye (Experiment 1).

Positive after images (and probably negative after images) are subject to (binocular) movement masking (Experiment 2).

Movement masking can occur in the field of either eye, but with the displays so far tried the inhibitory influence of a moving object is less in the field of the eye to which it is shown than in the field of the other eye (Experiment 3).