Grading the ‘cultural literacy’ project

The essay examines the argument advanced by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., for instituting ‘cultural literacy’ as a fundamental priority of schools. A number of confusions and equivocations in Hirsch's reasoning are identified, and the propensity of his project to indoctrinate is exposed. Among the features of Hirsch's argument shown to be troubling are his shifting construal of ‘language’, his inconsistency about the requirements of cultural literacy, and his uncritical relation to traditional images of the American past and present. The upshot is to raise the question why Hirsch's project has elicited wide support and praise.     

Referenzsemantik in der Partnermodellierung

How can we explain that an assertion on something perceived can be understood in the same manner by somebody who cannot perceive that scene? This problem bases the interest in computational linguistics in how listener modeling could possibly be harmonized with reference semantics. Mental images substituting real perception appear as a way out. The architecture of the listener model has to be adapted to the creation and use of such pictorial data structures. Furthermore, the relation between the latter and a verbal (i. e., propositional) representation must be understood. The resulting architecture of a listener model with reference semantics can be employed to solve communicational problems from three general classes in a better way, as is demonstrated by an example implementation.     

Social Identity,Relative Deprivation,and Coping With the Threat of Position Loss: A Field Study Among Native Shopkeepers in Amsterdam1

The present study investigates how native shopkeepers in Amsterdam respond to the threat experienced by the emergence of immigrant stores. A survey among 101 native shopkeepers confirmed that psychological, rather than instrumental, considerations play an important role. First, perceptions of fraternal deprivation were relatively independent of the amount of egoistical deprivation people perceived. Instead, the experience of fraternal deprivation was related to people's identification as native shopkeepers. Second, egoistical deprivation resulted in negative perceptions of all other entrepreneurs, regardless of their ethnic origin. Third, regardless of perceived egoistical deprivation, native shopkeepers were more likely to discredit immigrant entrepreneurs, as they thought they were more fraternally deprived.     

Ret in the college classroom

Thirty-five undergraduates participated in an outcome study which compared the results of enrollment in an RET seminar with enrollment in a seminar on another psychotherapy topic, Humanistic Psychology, and two seminars which lacked a psychotherapeutic orientation: Social Development and Extra Sensory Perception. RET instruction failed to decrease irrationality significantly. However, students who received RET instruction had significantly higher perceived self-efficacy than did those in the two nontherapy oriented seminars. There was a significant, inverse relationship between academic achievement (grade point average) and irrational beliefs about need for comfort, need for approval, awfulizing, and low frustration tolerance. Perceived self-efficacy was significantly and positively associated with high academic achievement. Superior students were significantly less likely than their peers to awfulize or exhibit low frustration tolerance; the poorest students were the least likely group to perceive themselves as effective. The implications of these findings for educators and counselors were addressed.A fellow in Rational-Emotive Therapy, Naomi McCormick, Ph.D. is a professor and William Tooke, Ph.D. is an assistant professor at the State University of New York-Plattsburgh. An earlier version of this article was presented at the World Congress on Mental Health Counseling: A 35th Anniversary Celebration of Rational-Emotive Therapy, Keystone, Colorado: June 13–16, 1990. The authors are grateful to H. Morlock for his methodological insights and thank G. Brannigan, N. Smith, and P. Jarvis for assisting in data collection. Special thanks go to H. Rock for providing information on students from the college's Office of Institutional Research.     

Perceived depth vs. structural relevance in the object-superiority effect

When subjects must identify a barely visible line in a briefly flashed display, their accuracy depends on the configuration of the context in which the target line appears. Weisstein and Harris (1974) found that accuracy is highest when the target is part of a pattern that resembles a unified, three-dimensional object, and lowest in a flat-looking pattern composed of disconnected lines; they labeled this phenomenon the object-superiority effect. In the three experiments reported here, identification accuracy was found to correlate highly and significantly (r =.78) with the judged depth of the patterns. Judged structural relevance of the target line to the pattern (McClelland & Miller, 1979) was uncorrelated with accuracy (r=?.28). Even when the target line appeared as an isolated fragment within the context pattern, a pattern perceived as three-dimensional yielded higher identification accuracy than one perceived as flat.