EVIDENCE FOR SUPERIOR ORTHOGRAPHIC SKILLS IN DYSLEXICS

Abstract— The purpose of this study was to assess the development of both phonological and orthographic skills in normally achieving and dyslexic readers The subjects were 257 dyslexic and 342 normally achieving readers, matched at eight reading levels They were administered the Woodcock (1987) Word Attack Subtest, a measure of phonological skills requiring the designed to measure awareness of the properties of English words and the probable sequences and positions of letters within words The dyslexics had significantly higher scores than the normally achieving readers on the orthographic awareness task However, the normally achieving readers had significantly higher scores on the Word Attack Subtest Therefore, the difficulties with phonological processing and the increased orthographic awareness of the dyslexics may indicate a reading strategy that relies more on the visual than the phonological.     

Adolescent AIDS Prevention in Context: The Impact of Peer Educator Qualities and Classroom Environments on Intervention Efficacy

Peer-led, school-based interventions show promise for preventing AIDS among adolescents, but little is known about the processes underlying effective peer education or the conditions that promote its efficacy. This study examined the implementation in one school of an effective, peer-led AIDS prevention program for inner-city 7th-grade participants (n = 123) and identified the qualities of peer educators (n = 15) and classroom environments (n = 5) that contributed to improvement in participants' postintervention AIDS-related attitudes. The Peer Educator Rating Scale was developed to assess two dimensions of participants' perceptions of peer educators: positive regard and perceived similarity. Participants reported greater positive regard for more highly individuated and less shy peer educators, and participants' positive regard for peer educators in turn was associated with lowered AIDS risk as measured by perceptions of peer norms regarding sexual activity and self-efficacy for peer communication regarding sexual topics and condoms. Participants' perceived similarity was not associated with any postintervention improvements in AIDS-related knowledge and attitudes. Participants' classroom membership was associated with improvements in all 5 knowledge and attitude scales, and exploratory classroom-level findings indicated that classroom intervention environments perceived as more organized by participants showed slightly greater overall improvements across AIDS-related knowledge and attitudes scales. Consistent with individual-level findings regarding participants' positive regard for peer educators, the two classrooms with the greatest positive regard for their peer educator teams showed the most student improvement. Implications for further research and the design of future prevention and promotion programs for adolescents are discussed.     

Relativism,truth, and incoherence

Conclusion There are many contemporary sources and defenders of epistemological relativism which have not been considered thus far. I have, for example, barely touched on the voluminous literature regarding frameworks, conceptual schemes, and Wittgensteinian forms of life. Davidson's challenge to the scheme/content distinction and thereby to conceptual relativism, Rorty's acceptance of the Davidsonian argument and his use of it to defend a relativistic position, Winchian and other sociological and anthropological arguments for relativism, recent work in the sociology of science, and Goodman's novel articulation of a relativism of worlds and of worldmaking, to mention just some of the contemporary loci of debate, all need to be addressed. So also do the plethora of relativistic arguments spawned by Kuhn and related literature in recent philosophy of science. Therefore, it cannot be said that there is no more to be said on behalf of epistemological relativism. Moreover, the positive task of delineating a defensible version of absolutism remains to be accomplished.Nevertheless, the defenses of relativism considered above do seem to have been successfully undercut. More specifically, the arguments for the incoherence of relativism are as compelling as ever, and have manifestly not been laid to rest by contemporary relativists. The basic Socratic insight that relativism is self-refuting, and so incoherent, remains a fundamental difficulty for those who would resuscitate and defend the ancient Protagorean doctrine or a modern variant of it.     

Adolescents' concepts of depression among their peers

The purpose of this study was to quantify the behavioral cues adolescents use to identify their peers as depressed in order to gain a more accurate understanding of the factors associated with adolescent depressive symptomatology. Because of limited information about depression in adolescents, a questionnaire was constructed to explore the concept in this age group. Ninety-nine middle and high school students, 12 to 18 years old, completed the questionnaire which included open-ended and forced choice questions. The results indicated that social isolation was an important component of adolescents' concepts of depression among their peers. Subjects felt that there was a higher frequency of alcohol and marijuana use among depressed as compared to non-depressed peers. Eighty-six percent of the subjects believed that most depressed adolescents had suicidal thoughts, but only 35% believed that most depressed adolescents had attempted suicide. Factor analyses of the subjects' responses to the open-ended questions delineated several underlying dimensions of depressive symptomatology which adolescents appear to use in identifying their peers as depressed.     

Evidence from rats that morphine tolerance is a learned response.

It is proposed that the direct analgesic effect of morphine becomes attenuated over the course of successive administrations of the narcotic by a conditioned, compensatory, hyperalgesic response elicited by the administration procedure, the net result being analgesic tolerance. Using the "hot plate" analgesia assessment situation with rats, this conditioning view of tolerance is supported by several findings: (a) It is necessary to have reliable environmental cues predicting the systemic effects of morphine if tolerance is to be observed, (b) a hyperalgesic conditioned response may be observed in morphine-tolerant subjects when drug administration cues are followed by a placebo, and (c) merely by repeatedly presenting environmental cues previously associated with morphine (but now presented with a placebo), morphine tolerance can be extinguished.     

Hue discrimination as a function of stimulus luminance

The relation between hue discrimination and stimulus luminance was investigated. It was found that discrimination was best at the highest luminance and deteriorated at the lowest, except in the yellow region.     

Pigeon concept formation: successive and simultaneous acquisition

Pigeons were trained to discriminate the presence of one or more human forms in displays projected on a panel above the response key. This task was mastered, although imperfectly, with successive and with simultaneous presentations of positive and negative instances. The course of acquisition of the discrimination was similar for the two training procedures. Animals were able to transfer the discrimination from the successive to the simultaneous situation. Various tests were carried out to control for artifactual cues on which the discrimination might have been based. The discrimination was maintained when new displays were presented, when reinforcement was omitted, and when displays were inverted 180°. Animals were also able to discriminate between pairs of displays that were identical, except that one member of the pair contained a human form. The research extends the techniques used by Herrnstein and Loveland (1964), and confirms their finding that pigeons can master the concept of “person-present” in a visual display.     

Attributions for negative life events and depression: the role of perceived control

Although perceptions of control occupied a central role in the development of learned helplessness theory, recent helplessness research has not considered controllability judgments when relating attributions to depression. Supporting the importance of this construct, the research discussed in this article found evidence that judgments of control interact with other attributions in predicting depression. Specifically, in a prospective study of stress and well-being in adolescence, internal, stable, and global attributions for negative events attributed to uncontrollable causes were found to be positively related to increases in depression (as predicted by the reformulated helplessness theory), but internal and global attributions for negative events attributed to controllable causes were found to be inversely related to increases in depression. The discussion considers the implications of the findings for understanding the nature of the relation between attributions for naturally occurring life events and depression.     

Peer interactions of normal and attention-deficit-disordered boys during free-play,cooperative task,and simulated classroom situations

Groups of 30 ADD-H boys and 90 normal boys were divided into 30 mixed dyads composed of a normal and an ADD-H boy, and 30 normal dyads composed of 2 normal boys. Dyads were videotaped interacting in 15-minute free-play, 15-minute cooperative task, and 15-minute simulated classroom settings. Mixed dyads engaged in more controlling interaction than normal dyads in both free-play and simulated classroom settings. In the simulated classroom, mixed dyads completed fewer math problems and were less compliant with the commands of peers. ADD-H children spent less simulated classroom time on task and scored lower on drawing tasks than normal peers. Older dyads proved less controlling, more compliant with peer commands, more inclined to play and work independently, less active, and more likely to remain on task during the cooperative task and simulated classroom settings. Results suggest that the ADD-H child prompts a more controlling, less cooperative pattern of responses from normal peers.