A Comparison of Gifted,General, and Special Learning Needs Students on Academic and Social Self-Concept

The purpose of this study was to compare students identified as gifted, general, and having special learning needs on academic and social self-concept. The three groups of students were identified by their schools according to their academic abilities. Gifted students were selected because of inordinately high academic abilities, those with special learning needs because of inordinate academic difficulties, and general students because their academic abilities were not at either extreme. Junior high school students (N = 243) completed the Tennessee Self-Concept Scale and the School Attitude Measure. These measures were given in September and then repeated in May of the same academic year. Gifted students tended to score highest on both academic and social self-concept, although this relationship was influenced somewhat by sex. Students with special learning needs scored lowest on all variables. Differences found in the September testing were maintained in May. Educational implications of these results are elaborated.     

Lay Persons' and Police Officers' Beliefs Regarding Deceptive Behaviour

Research on the detection of deception, via non-verbal cues, has shown that people's ability to successfully discriminate between truth and deception is only slightly better than chance level. One of the reasons for these disappointing findings possibly lies in people's inappropriate beliefs regarding ‘lying behaviour’. A 64-item questionnaire originally used in Germany, which targets participants' beliefs regarding truthful and deceptive behaviour, was used. The present study differed from previous research in three ways: (i) instead of a student population, police officers and lay people were sampled, (ii) both people's beliefs regarding others' deceptive behaviour and their beliefs regarding their own deceptive behaviour were examined, and (iii) both non-verbal cues to, and content characteristics of, deceptive statements were examined. Results were consistent with previous studies, which found significant differences between people's beliefs regarding deceptive behaviour and experimental observations of actual deceptive behaviour. Further, police officers held as many false beliefs as did lay people and finally, participants were more accurate in their beliefs regarding their own deceptive behaviour than they were in their beliefs regarding others' behaviour.     

Exploring Organizational Obstruction and the Expanded Model of Organizational Identification

We argue that perceptions of organizational support and obstruction will have unique implications for employees' cognitive association and disassociation with their employers. As expected, the results of 2 studies support the hypothesis that perceived organizational support is positively related to an overlap in individual and organizational identities (i.e., organizational identification). Further, perceptions of organizational obstruction predict cognitive separation in individual and organizational identities (i.e., disidentification, ambivalent identification, and neutral identification). Implications for research and practice are discussed.     

Feedback of college grades to high schools

The conventional way for colleges to furnish high schools with the college performance information on their former students is to send grade reports on these students. This practice raises some important questions regarding the ethics, utility, and reliability of releasing the grades without the student's permission. The purpose of this paper is to describe an expectancy table method of communication which surmounts many of the limitations associated with the traditional practice of providing individual grade reports.     

Reducing Suggestibility in Child Witness Interviews

This study set out to test the prediction that a Cognitive Interview may increase resistance to subsequent misleading suggestions in child witness interviews. The misleading information was presented in the form of questions both prior to, and after, a cognitive or structured interview to 8- and 9-year-old witnesses to a video-taped event. Use of the cognitive interview resulted in more correct responses to post-interview questions than did the structured interview even though there was not quite a significant effect of the cognitive interview on information recalled during the actual interview. On the basis of their interview performance, the children were classified as ‘intruders’ or ‘non-intruders’ (i.e. those children who intruded pre-interview misleading items into the subsequent interview and those who did not). The ‘non-intruders’ made significantly fewer errors on the post-interview questions, indicating lower vulnerability to misleading information. Moreover, those children who selected the ‘don't know’ option made fewer errors in the interview and were more accurate in their responses. Theoretical and practical implications of the data are discussed in the context of group differences in vulnerability to suggestion and techniques for increasing resistance to suggestion.