The Counselor and Student Discipline: Suggested Roles

The problem of role definition for counselors relative to discipline problems has been persistent. Difficulties in defining and adopting appropriate roles in discipline have been exacerbated by conflicting expectations between and among administrators, counselors, and faculty. This article provides a short summary and analysis of the literature on the counselor's role in school discipline; possible counselor roles are grouped into six categories: mediator, ombudsman, consultant, psychological educator, special program developer, and counselor. From the variety of roles defined and discussed, counselors may find one or a combination of several roles that both satisfy the needs of their students and are appropriate to their own personalities and/or skill levels.     

The effects of attention-directing training on recognition memory task performance of three-year-old children

Thirty-eight 3-year-old children served as subjects in an investigation of recognition memory in which schematic faces differing only in the orientation of the eyes were employed as stimuli. A pretest was administered to all children, after which the two experimental groups received training in either attention to the distinctive feature of the training stimuli (also schematic faces) by means of a matching task, or in labeling the faces according to how they looked (sleepy, happy, sad, mad) and in using the labels to perform a matching task. After the training session all children were given a posttest on recognition memory of the faces. The verbally trained group obtained significantly higher scores on the posttest than either the feature or control groups. These results indicate that although the children were able to discriminate the faces, evidenced in their ease of performance on the training tasks, they were not able to use this knowledge unless given training in attaching labels to the stimuli, which enabled them to store the information for later use. Results are discussed in light of Gibson's (1969) theory of the developmental interrelations of cognitive processes.     

RELATIVE EFFECTIVENESS OF TEACHER ATTENTION AND THE “GOOD BEHAVIOR GAME” IN MODIFYING DISRUPTIVE CLASSROOM BEHAVIOR1

A variety of behavioral procedures have been employed in recent years to modify disruptive classroom behavior. Such methods have been developed with the belief that curtailing disruptive behavior would strengthen positive classroom performance. In this study, two procedures, the good behavior game and the teacher-attention method, were compared to determine short-run effectiveness. Four teachers (two fourth-grade and two fifth-grade) implemented both methods in their classrooms over a five-week period. Presentation of methods was alternated in a counterbalanced design to control for order effects. Each of the four classrooms consisted of 25 students. A time-sampling procedure was used to record the presence or absence of disruptive behavior within 15-second intervals. Disruptive behavior was defined as any talking-out or out-of-seat behavior without permission. The results indicated that both procedures were effective in modifying disruptive classroom behavior, but that the good behavior game reduced disruptive behavior significantly better than the teacher-attention method. In addition, all teachers preferred the game to the teacher-attention procedure. This reaction seemed related to the effort involved in initiating the two activities. The good behavior game required less effort on the teacher's part. However, use of the game alone raises certain ethical considerations. One such issue involves abuse of peer pressure. Also, there is a possibility that negative rules may tend to promote resentment. Positively stated rules would ameliorate that problem. Another relates to the possibility that some teachers might be carried away by the ease of the game's implementation to the extent that behavior control becomes the primary objective in the classroom. As a result, one might consider use of the game to maximize short-term change, but then phase out this procedure in favor of another method (e.g., teacher attention) for long-run effects.     

A three-component analysis of the modality effect in single-trial free recall

Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe Unversität, Frankfurt am Main, West-Germany In single-trial free recall a superiority of acoustical over visual presentation has been observed in the recency part of the serial position curve. The rehearsal-buffer model by Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968) was modified to distinguish between three different explanations that are discussed in the literature. The application of the model allowed some of the parameters to vary across modes of presentation while other parameters were held constant. A model assuming either a precategorical acoustical storage or additional processing for visually presented items gives a better account of the results than does a model derived from a two-store hypothesis.     

The influence of evaluatee's sex on evaluations of a response on a managerial selection instrument

In this study 33 male and 22 female undergraduate students were trained and then asked to evaluate an in-basket response (with either a male or female respondent) on four dimensions: sensitivity, organizing and planning, decision-making, and written communications. Results indicated that the evaluatee's sex did not influence evaluations of the in-basket response. Female in comparison to male evaluators were significantly harsher in evaluating written communications. The absence of sex discrimination which sharply differed from the findings of several previous research studies is discussed in terms of the substantial amount of managerial related data provided by the in-basket technique.This report is based on a master's thesis written by the second author under the sponsorship of the first author and submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the MA degree at Florida Technological University.     

Effects of expectancies of different reward magnitudes in transfer from noncontingent pairings to instrumental performance

In two experiments, rats received noncontingent pairings of two stimuli with food reward, one paired with small reward and the other with large reward, and received bar press training with large reward or with small reward. When the noncontingent stimuli (NS) were presented for test during subsequent rewarded bar pressing and during early extinction of bar pressing, responding for each group was faster in the presence of the NS which was paired with the same reward magnitude that group received in bar press training than to the NS which had been paired with a different reward magnitude. As extinction progressed, all groups responded more slowly in the presence of the NS which had been paired with the large reward than in the presence of the NS which had been paired with small reward. These results were interpreted as indicating that responding in the presence of an NS depends on: (i) whether the reward expectancy elicited by the NS has been conditioned to the instrumental response, and (ii) the relationship between the reward expected in the presence of the NS and that received in test.