Attributional patterns and perceptions of math and science among fifth-grade through seventh-grade girls and boys

A culturally and economically diverse group of fifth to seventh graders (n = 361) from Boston-area public schools rated their perceptions for liking and difficulty of core academic subjects, including math and science, and their attributions for explaining performance on a math test. Inconsistent with earlier work, girls and boys reported similar perceptions of core subjects, with all students reporting a relatively high liking of math and science. Girls' and boys' attributional patterns for success in math were somewhat consistent with earlier findings, but not their attributions for lack of success. Observations of the math and science classrooms in the study indicated that most teachers, aware of gender equity issues, attempted to teach their students in a gender-fair manner. This factor may account for differences between current findings and those from past studies.Special thanks to Dr. Adele Wolfson for her advice and support. Thanks also to Dr. Lee Cuba and Lillian Sun for their assistance with statistical analyses; to Dr. Beth Hennessey for help with the measure; to Drs. Ken Hawes, Barbara Beatty, and Susan Reverby for connections into schools; to Dr. Martha Pott for suggestions on the original document; to the teachers and principals who granted permission to conduct the research; and to the student participants. Appreciation is also extended to an anonymous reviewer for insightful comments.     

Assessing decision strategies using HyperCard

The use of “process-tracing” techniques for examining individuals’ decision strategies has been criticized widely for yielding results that are uninformative and often confounded. The present paper describes a new technique based on a “structural” approach that allows efficient assessment of finely discriminated decision strategies via a HyperCard program called DECOUT. The program presents individuals with an information matrix (e.g., describing five alternative pesticides on three attributes). Individuals are asked to choose the best or the worst alternative in the matrix for 12 problems. Information in the matrix is constructed so that choice of an alternative by an individual is uniquely associated with use of one particular decision strategy. The strategies include information integration, maximin, maximax, pessimism-optimism, and minimax-regret processes. An experiment using the program is described, and possible directions for future research and development are discussed.     

Performance of dyslexic children on speech perception tests

Several researchers who have compared the performance of dyslexic and normal-reading children on a variety of different tasks have suggested that dyslexic children may have subtle deficits in the phonemic analysis of spoken as well as written language. Thus it is of interest to know how children who have extraordinary difficulty learning to read can perform explicity auditory-phonetic tasks. Seventeen dyslexic children (10 years of age) and a group of 17 controls were administered tests of identification and discrimination of synthesized voiced stop consonants differing in place of articulation. These were tests of the type used to study categorical perception in adults, adapted for use with young children. Significant differences between dyslexics and controls were found in both kinds of tasks; the pattern of identification and discrimination differences suggests an inconsistency in the dyslexics' phonetic classification of auditory cues. A significant relationship was found between reading level and speech discrimination.     

Effects of prior juror experience on jury sentencing

The effect of prior juror service on jury sentencing was investigated in an archival study of 143 criminal trials resulting in convictions. Trials took place over two calendar years in a state circuit court requiring jurors to serve 30-day terms. Jurors sentenced defendants in each case according to a set of guidelines determined by trial judges. The severity of the sentences imposed by jurors was rated by 101 subjects on a scale of 1 (least severe) to 100 (most severe). The results indicated that the more experienced juries gave significantly more severe sentences than did the less experienced juries. This finding was unchanged when civil court experience was considered in addition to criminal court experience. Possible interpretations of these results are discussed.     

Violence in children's animated television

Pairs of cartoon episodes which did and did not meet the National Association of Broadcaster's Code for Violence were rated by college students and children on a series of scales to evaluate level of violence and of enjoyment. The results indicated that the Code has been ineffective in reducing levels of rated violence; however, entertainment value has decreased.     

Group caution at the race track

McCauley, Stitt, Woods and Lipton's finding that groups were more conservative than individuals when betting at a race track has been criticized on statistical and methodological grounds. The present study which does not suffer the shortcomings for which McCauley et al. were legitimately criticized does, nonetheless, sustain their general results and conclusions. Groups were significantly more cautious than individuals when wagering $2.00 on a horse race.     

Performance of typical and superior face recognizers on a novel interactive face matching procedure

Unfamiliar simultaneous face matching is error prone. Reducing incorrect identification decisions will positively benefit forensic and security contexts. The absence of view-independent information in static images likely contributes to the difficulty of unfamiliar face matching. We tested whether a novel interactive viewing procedure that provides the user with 3D structural information as they rotate a facial image to different orientations would improve face matching accuracy. We tested the performance of ‘typical’ (Experiment 1) and ‘superior’ (Experiment 2) face recognizers, comparing their performance using high-quality (Experiment 3) and pixelated (Experiment 4) Facebook profile images. In each trial, participants responded whether two images featured the same person with one of these images being either a static face, a video providing orientation information, or an interactive image. Taken together, the results show that fluid orientation information and interactivity prompt shifts in criterion and support matching performance. Because typical and superior face recognizers both benefited from the structural information provided by the novel viewing procedures, our results point to qualitatively similar reliance on pictorial encoding in these groups. This also suggests that interactive viewing tools can be valuable in assisting face matching in high-performing practitioner groups.     

The role of two emotion regulation tendencies across two waiting periods

Motivation and Emotion - The distress associated with uncertainty differs in important ways from distress over clear and present stressors. Emotion regulation (ER) tendencies—namely...