ACQUISITION OF BLENDING SKILLS: COMPARISONS AMONG BODY-CODA,ONSET-RIME,AND PHONEME BLENDING TASKS

Following research on phonological awareness development, this study explores children's acquisition of blending skills using three types of stimuli: body-coda, onset-rime, and phonemes. The results demonstrated that kindergarten children consistently gained proficiency for blending body-coda stimuli prior to onset-rime stimuli and phonemes. The results are interpreted to support an instructional process where blending is treated as a generalizable skill, and children work with the simplest material first. Thus, our proposition is that children be trained to blend body-codas first, then progress to more phonologically difficult blending tasks such as onset-rimes and phonemes.     

'Wholly Present' Defined

Three‐dimensionalists, sometimes referred to as endurantists, think that objects persist through time by being “wholly present” at every time they exist. But what is it for something to be wholly present at a time? It is surprisingly difficult to say. the three‐dimensionalist is free, of course, to take ‘is wholly present at’ as one of her theory's primitives, but this is problematic for at least one reason: some philosophers claim not to understand her primitive. Clearly the three‐dimensionalist would be better off if she could state her theory in terms accessible to all. We think she can. What is needed is a definition of ‘is wholly present at’ that all can understand, in this paper, we offer one.     

THE EFFECTS OF APPLICANTs' REACTIONS TO COGNITIVE ABILITY TESTS AND AN ASSESSMENT CENTER

Manufacturing applicants' perceptions of two selection devices were examined. In Study 1, applicants ( n = 3,984) completed cognitive ability tests and a survey of reactions. In Study 2, a subset of applicants from Study 1 ( n = 194) participated in an assessment center and completed the survey. Applicants reacted favorably to the procedures but viewed the assessment center as more face valid than the cognitive tests. Applicants who perceived the selection techniques more favorably were also more satisfied with the selection process, the job, and the organization. Although applicants' perceptions of the procedures were related to job acceptance intentions, applicants' liking of the job and organization explained the largest unique variance. In future studies, applicants' job acceptance intentions and attitudes toward the job and organization should be assessed before and after administration of selection devices; not controlling for prior impressions resulted in overestimation of the contribution of applicants' perceptions of selection procedures.