Effects of behavioral and medical models of consultation on teacher expectancies and instruction of a hypothetical child

Sixty first- and second-grade teachers were randomly assigned to one of four conditions representing variations in consultation where they were required to teach a hypothetical child to add. The first condition involved face-to-face behavioral consultation in which the consultant cued a teacher to verbalize antecedent and consequent conditions that might affect learning and prompted the teacher to specify the kinds of capabilities that the child would need in order to master the academic task targeted for instruction. In the second type of behavioral consultation, face-to-face consultation was augmented by a task analysis report specifying prerequisite skills. The third type, medical model consultation, involved face-to-face consultation focusing on temporally remote environmental circumstances accompanied by a traditional psychological report specifying that the child was of low ability. The control group was asked general questions about the school. Results suggested that behavioral consultation with task analysis was associated with significantly more teaching success than was control, medical model, and behavioral consultation without task analysis. Moreover, behavioral consultation without task analysis was better than medical model consultation. Implications for psychoeducational assessment are discussed within the context of teacher expectations and instruction.     

I. Validity of WISC-R factor scores in predicting achievement and attention for four sociocultural groups

The predictive validity of WISC-R factor scores was examined with samples from the four sociocultural groups of Anglo, Black, Chicano, and native American Papago. The Full Scale IQ and Verbal Comprehension (VC) factor scores were significantly better predictors of achievement as measured by teacher ratings and the Metropolitan Achievement Test. The Perceptual Organization and Freedom from Distractibility (FD) factor scores were also significantly related to achievement, but at a lower level than Full Scale and VC. The correlations of the WISC-R and achievement measures were nearly the same for three of the four groups (exception was native American Papago). The relationship of the FD factor score to ratings of attention was statistically significant, but relatively low. Cautions in interpreting FD as a measure of attention were recommended due to overlap of distributions and low proportion of variance in attention accounted for by FD.     

Marijuana Revisited

This review examines recent research on the psychological effects of marijuana. The article contains material on potency, research problems, use patterns in the United States, and expectancy, as well as a review of research on acute effects, including psychosis, toxic delerium, acute anxiety, and brain damage. Nonacute effects are also examined, with material on studies of amotivational syndrome, intellectual functioning, memory, sexual activity, and driving. Research on marijuana's relationship to other drugs and to criminal behavior is also evaluated. Implications for counselors are discussed. Counselors are urged to help provide accurate information to users and to encourage an informed-decision approach. The significance of marijuana use to value and life-style choice and the counselor's role in considering marijuana law changes are evaluated.     

Adaptation in distance perception with head-movement parallax serving as the veridical cue

When head-movement parallax functioned as the sole veridical distance cue during exposure to spectacles that altered the eyes’ oculomotor adjustments, sizable adaptation was obtained. This result showed that a discrimination of the distances of 60 and 30 cm can be based on head-movement parallax. Using adaptation in demonstrating that head-movement parallax can serve as a distance cue circumvents the problem that the presence of accommodation normally presents when such a demonstration is attempted. The usual contamination of head-movement parallax with accommodation is avoided, because accommodation is altered by the spectacles and does pot function as a veridical cue along with head-movement parallax.     

Saccade size control in reading: Evidence for the linguistic control hypothesis

In Experiment 1, it is shown that during reading the eye makes larger saccades near long words than near short words. The effects are reduced when the subject’s peripheral vision is diminished by the use of a moving “window” centered on the subject’s fixation point, outside of which letters are replaced by Xs. In Experiment 2, it is shown that even if linguistic predictions are kept constant, the eye tends to make longer jumps when approaching THE than when approaching a three-letter verb. This “THE-skipping” effect is weaker if THE is compared with an auxiliary (HAD, WAS, or ARE) than if it is compared with a less frequently occurring verb (ATE, RAN, MET). It follows that knowledge of the lexicon can combine with information from peripheral vision fast enough to influence saccade size from moment to moment.     

Perceived objectivity and the effects of evaluative reinforcement upon compliance and self-evaluation in blacks

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of positive and negative reinforcements upon black college students. In the first experiment subjects received either positive or negative reinforcement from a black or a white Evaluator. Behavioral change (compliance) was greater in response to negative reinforcement from a black Evaluator than in response to negative reinforcement from a white Evaluator, while there were no divergent effects of Evaluator's Race upon compliance with positive reinforcement. The same pattern obtained in subjects' self-evaluations. The second experiment offered a test of the hypothesis that the objectivity of black Evaluators was perceived as greater than that of white Evaluators, and that a manipulation aimed at equating the Evaluators on objectivity would attenuate the effects of Evaluator's Race upon compliance and self-evaluation in response to negative reinforcement. These hypotheses were generally supported by the results.     

Handedness and stuttering: A dead horse?

A handedness questionnaire was administered to 446 stutterers and a control group. No significant male/female or stutterer/control effects were found, although both males and stutterers tended to be less right handed. The slight sex effect in handedness is consistent with previously reported studies and with cerebral structural and functional asymmetries.     

Memory for pictures and words as a function of level of processing: Depth or dual coding?

The experiment was designed to test differential predictions derived from dual-coding and depth-of-processing hypotheses. Subjects under incidental memory instructions free recalled a list of 36 test events, each presented twice. Within the list, an equal number of events were assigned to structural, phonemic, and semantic processing conditions. Separate groups of subjects were tested with a list of pictures, concrete words, or abstract words. Results indicated that retention of concrete words increased as a direct function of the processing-task variable (structural < phonemic 相似文献   

Influence of temporal masking on click-pair discriminability

When temporal auditory acuity is estimated using time-reversed click pairs, the asymmetry of temporal masking may influence the results. To investigate this hypothesis, we first established normal-hearing listeners’ psychometric functions for the discrimination of time-reversed click pairs. An attempt to relate listeners’ performances in click-pair discrimination to their performances in forward and backward masking tasks was unsuccessful, probably due to the presence of spectral artifact in the temporal masking paradigms. We then investigated listeners’ abilities to discriminate time-reversed click pairs in which the intensity of the lower level click in one pair was altered. This alteration was introduced at random in order to minimize the influence of spectral artifact. Our results suggest that the course of temporal masking influenced the discriminability of the modified click pairs. Thus, the discrimination of time-reversed click pairs may yield a biased estimate of auditory temporal acuity.     

INTERACTIONS BETWEEN TEACHER GUIDANCE AND CONTINGENT ACCESS TO PLAY IN DEVELOPING PREACADEMIC SKILLS OF DEVIANT PRESCHOOL CHILDREN1

Token-mediated access to play and snacks was made contingent on completion of academic tasks in the Baseline Experiment. This contingency produced stable completion rates that were subsequently doubled, and then tripled, for four deviant children in a special preschool. A reversal design demonstrated that the contingency was functional in maintaining the children's rates of task completion. The Guidance Experiment examined the role of a social event, teacher guidance, in the acquisition of task-completion skills, in a multiple-baseline-across-tasks design (with reversals). The analysis demonstrated that teacher guidance was an important supplement to the token-mediated contingency in establishing significant increases in task completions for a second group of three deviant children in the special class. The importance of teacher guidance was related to the difficulty level of the children's tasks.