The impact of accountability on teachers’ assessments of student performance: a social cognitive analysis

Research on teachers’ judgments of student performance has demonstrated that educational assessments may be biased or may more correctly take the achievements of students into account depending on teachers’ motivations while making the judgment. Building on research on social judgment formation the present investigation examined whether the accountability of teachers has an influence on judgment formation. We predicted that unaccountable teachers would activate social categories and use them for the assessment, whereas accountable teachers’ attention would be directed to individual attributes of students. Using secondary school teachers as participants, three studies investigating teachers’ assessments, inferences and memory for students’ attributes supported these hypotheses. Thus, accountability appears to be a moderator of social information processing and judgment formation in the domain of educational assessments.     

Umgang mit gefährlichen Straftätern in England und Wales

Forensic psychiatric institutions exist in all western European countries. Their organisation depends on a number of factors including the legal framework and societal attitudes towards mentally disordered offenders. This article describes and critically comments on the forensic psychiatric system in England and Wales, its legal framework and approaches to dealing with dangerous offenders. England and Wales have a long forensic psychiatric tradition with the first high security hospital, Broadmoor hospital, having been established in 1863. Evidence-based treatment approaches in forensic hospitals as well as in prisons, training of forensic psychiatrists and research in the field of forensic psychiatry have gained international recognition. However, there are some worrying aspects in the system of forensic psychiatric care and the criminal justice system more generally, in particular the high and still increasing number of prisoners in comparison with other European countries, the low age of criminal responsibility, long sentences, increasing length of stay in forensic care and the increasingly risk averse culture. A number of differences to the German system can be found; one such difference relates to the role of criminal responsibility which is irrelevant for decisions regarding commitment in England and Wales. Only the mental state and need for treatment at the time of trial (or later assessment in prison) determine whether an offender is admitted to psychiatric care or receives a prison sentence. A number of new initiatives have been launched in recent years resulting in an increasing number of individuals being detained in forensic psychiatric and criminal justice institutions, in particular the initiative for the detention and treatment of individuals with so-called dangerous and severe personality disorders, the sexual offenders register and the new sentence of indeterminate imprisonment for public protection. These initiatives have been the subject of a number of complaints to the European Court of Human Rights. Nevertheless, the trend towards a more and more risk averse culture continues.     

Die schrittweise interaktive Entstehung einer Fehlbeschuldigung sexuellen Missbrauchs

False accusations of sexual abuse and also violent sexual misconduct by persons in a close relationship often have a long history of development by which the alleged victim increasingly involves other persons who are then used to substantiate the authenticity and truth of the claims, even before allegations are made. Using three cases as examples this article describes the approaches used which are found particularly in emotionally unstable borderline type personalities. When a mental disorder or personality disorder of the alleged victim is suspected, the volitional competence to testify should be tested. This applies not only for borderline personality disorders (which is occasionally reclassified as posttraumatic disorder) but also when symptoms of a puberty crisis, an adolescence crisis or another relevant crisis, such as a posttraumatic disorder are present.     

Musiktherapie in der deutschen Psychosomatik

The authors report about the clinical implementation of music therapy in psychosomatic hospitals in FRG based on a survey among practising music therapists: attending especially to the qualification of music therapists, their integration and the problem of indication. The coverage of music therapy in the standard textbooks on psychosomatic medicine is discussed.Finally the state of research on music therapy in psychosomatic hospitals is reviewed.     

A unified account of the conjunction fallacy by coherence

We propose a coherence account of the conjunction fallacy applicable to both of its two paradigms (the M–A paradigm and the A–B paradigm). We compare our account with a recent proposal by Tentori et al. (J Exp Psychol Gen 142(1): 235–255, 2013) that attempts to generalize earlier confirmation accounts. Their model works better than its predecessors in some respects, but it exhibits only a shallow form of generality and is unsatisfactory in other ways as well: it is strained, complex, and untestable as it stands. Our coherence account inherits the strength of the confirmation account, but in addition to being applicable to both paradigms, it is natural, simple, and readily testable. It thus constitutes the next natural step for Bayesian theorizing about the conjunction fallacy.

     

Exploring the Boundaries of Sublexical Word Identification Units: The Use of Onsets and Rimes and Reading Ability

Four priming experiments investigating the functional use of onsets and rimes as identification units in normally and poorly reading children, matched on reading age level, are reported. Experiments 1 (onsets) and 2 (rimes) used monosyllabic words. High- and low-frequency bigram letter clusters were primed. Primes turned out to be more effective when they coincided with the rimes of target words then when they did not. For onsets this was not the case. The effect of priming was stronger in low-frequency letter clusters. For rime units there was a significant prime by rime coincidence interaction, consistent with data presented by Bowey (1990). A differential effect of rime priming was obtained for the ability groups in high-frequency letter clusters. Only in the normal reader control group were response latencies negatively affected by noncoinciding primes in high-frequency rime units. This finding suggests that these subjects probably had better access to letter information in the final part of words. In Experiments 3 (onsets) and 4 (rimes) bisyllabic compound nouns were used. Elements of the second syllable were used as primes. Main group effects were found in both experiments, but the effects obtained with monosyllabic words were not replicated. It is concluded that onset/rime mechanisms primarily operate within the boundaries of monosyllabic words and/or in stressed syllables.