S&T indicators for strategic planning and assessment of public research institutions

This article presents an approach we have developed for the assessment of public research institutions in the natural sciences and engineering. The method consists in the exploitation of available S&T databases and indicators, including bibliometrics (databases of scientific as well as technical literature), patents, and internal data. Results are therefore derived through multiple databases. The objective is to profile a specific national R&D community in order to assess the positioning of a public institution or program within the community to which it belongs. It involves obtaining the profile of the evolution of an R&D area, the R&D performers, the financing and support institutions, the users of R&D results, and the interactions between all these actors. A case-study of Canadian research in polymers is presented. Part of this research was financed by the National Research Council of Canada, and by a strategic grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. The research benefited from the expertise of Robert Letellier, Robert H. Marchessault, Jacques Martel, and Marielle Piché, and from the technical assistance of Maryse Prud’homme, Marcel Parent, and Benoit Longpré.     

Using computer-mediated conferencing to facilitate group projects in an educational psychology course

A course design is presented as a model for incorporating computer-mediated conferencing (CMC) in support of administering, organizing, and evaluating group projects in a psychology course. Students in an educational psychology course use e-mail and an electronic bulletin board system to communicate within and between student groups as well as with the instructor. Critical elements for the implementation of CMC are discussed, and suggestions for ways to avoid problems are offered.     

The psychologist's role in assessing and facilitating patients' knowledge of advance directives in medical settings: A preliminary investigation

In a time of budgetary shortfalls in the medical industry, an aging population, and an increased emphasis on health care choices, psychologists are being called upon to administer advance medical directive programs to patients. This study reports preliminary findings from a program to assess and facilitate patients' knowledge of advance directives (ADs) by the Psychology Service at the Ann Arbor VA Medical Center. The participant pool included 243 male veteran patients admitted to medical and surgical wards at the hospital. The intervention included the use of a computer-generated prompt for consultation, which was sent to the psychology staff in response to a patient inquiry regarding ADs. It also involved an increased emphasis on the delivery of written material on ADs by the admissions clerks. The intervention appeared to result in a modest increase in patients' knowledge of advance directives. Suggestions are offered for areas that should be emphasized in future attempts to increase patients' knowledge and utilization of advance directives.     

The use of a self-control package to enhance temporal generality of a parent training program

The purpose of the present study was to examine the effectiveness of a self-control package in enhancing temporal generality of a parent training program. Sixteen mothers and their clinic-referred noncompliant children were assigned to either a parent training alone group, or a parent training plus self-control group. All mother-child dyads were treated individually by teaching the mother to reward compliance and other prosocial behavior, and to use time-out for noncompliance. In addition, mothers who also received self-control training learned to self-monitor their use of their new parenting skills and to reinforce themselves for use of the skill during a 2 month follow-up period. Assessment consisted of four home observations by independent observers prior to treatment, after treatment, and at a 2 month follow-up. The data indicated that the children in the parent training plus self-control group were significantly more compliant and less deviant at the 2 month follow-up than the children in the parent training alone group. Parental behavior did not differ between the two groups at the follow-up.     

Developmental trends in distractibility: Is absolute or proportional decrement the appropriate measure of interference?

Since baseline performance varies with age, diminished interference effects found with increasing age do not provide evidence for a developmental trend in distractibility unless their relationship to baseline performance is known. In the present study, baseline difficulty was varied in two speeded classification experiments to investigate whether interference effects due to irrelevant information could best be characterized by absolute or proportional decrement models. In Experiment 1, first graders, third graders, and adults sorted cards on the basis of square size, both in the presence and absence of extraneous stimulus information. In Experiment 2, first graders and adults sorted cards on the basis of the density of a regular array of dots and two kinds of irrelevant information were used. Robust interference effects were found which declined with age. Manipulating discriminability of the relevant stimulus dimension resulted in large changes in sorting time, but interference effects did not vary with baseline difficulty. These results were interpreted as strongly supporting both an absolute decrement model and a developmental trend in distractibility.     

Factors in the referral of children for behavioral treatment: A comparison of mothers of clinic-referred deviant,clinic-referred non-deviant and non-c

The purpose of this study was to compare a non-clinic sample of mothers and children to two groups of clinic-referred children and their mothers. The two clinic-referred groups differed from one another in that the selection criterion for one group of children (Clinic Deviant) was that they were significantly more deviant and non-compliant than the non-clinic group whereas the selection criterion for the second group of children (Clinic Non-deviant) was that they did not differ significantly from the non-clinic group on deviant and non-compliant behavior. Home observations by independent observers and parent questionnaires examining parental adjustment and parental perceptions of child adjustment were completed. The results indicated that both clinic groups perceived their children as more maladjusted than parents in the non-clinic groups perceived their children. Parents of the children in the Clinic Non-deviant group were significantly more depressed than those in the remaining two groups, whereas parents in the Clinic Deviant group issued more vague, interrupted commands than those in the Clinic Non-deviant group. Implications of the findings are discussed.     

Social skill performance among normal and psychiatric inpatient children as a function of assessment conditions

The present investigation examined the effects of varying the standard assessment conditions on performance of social skills among normal and psychiatric inpatient children. Sixty children (30 normals, 30 patients), ages 6–12, completed behavioral and self-report measures of social skills on two separate occasions. During the second assessment, half of the children received feedback and incentives for performance; the other half did not. The testing conditions consistently altered social skill performance. Children who received the incentives during assessment showed significantly higher levels of social skills, as reflected in concrete behavior (e.g. eye contact, facial expressions), and molar responses (e.g. giving compliments, responding to provocation). The results suggest that social skills performance varies considerably as a function of the assessment conditions. Training programs should not assume that persons do not have the responses in their repertoires merely because of low pretest performance unless more extensive efforts are made to evoke appropriate responses.     

Incorporating inferences in narrative representations: A study of how and why

Four experiments examined the conceptual organization of narrative passages and the extent to which these representations were explanatory in a variety of experimental tasks. The conceptual representation of a passage consisted of a graph of labeled nodes and labeled, directed arcs which were adopted from the Conceptual Dependency Theory. These representations included both explicitly stated information and inferences which had been empirically extracted by a question-answering procedure. Symbolic procedures for answering how- and why-questions were also delineated. The conceptual representations and the symbolic procedures that operate on these representations together accounted for 91% of the answers generated from question-answering protocols in Experiment 1, and also the rated quality of specific answers to specific questions in Experiment 2. Experiments 3 and 4 supported the hypothesis that structural properties of the representations can predict recall of explicitly stated nodes and verification ratings of inference nodes. The results provide encouraging support for the proposed graphic representations and also for the use of question-answering protocols in uncovering prose inferences.