Preconceptional family health evaluation: A regional education program for family planning clients and health professionals

The Preconceptional Family Health Evaluation Program was a regional project developed and funded for 2 years by the New England Regional Genetics Group (NERGG) to educate family planning health professionals about genetics, and to offer family planning clients preconceptional identification of genetic and environmental exposure risks. To meet these goals, genetic education was provided on a regional basis to 45 family planning professionals. A self-administered family health risk questionnaire adaptable to individual family planning settings was developed. Five hundred and twenty-nine family planning clients voluntarily completed the questionnaire. Cigarette smoking (35%) and alcohol use (57%) were two major categories of risks identified. The Preconceptional Family Health Evaluation Program was well received by all participants and provided an effective means for regional education of family planning health professionals. As a result of the program, state program planners, clinical genetics services, and family planning health professionals developed a strong relationship that will serve future educational and genetic risk screening efforts.     

Lexical development norms for young children

Developmental norms for young children’s vocabularies have a number of applications in research design, assessment, and intervention, but have previously been very difficult to obtain. In the present study, month-by-month norms for comprehension and production of 396 words from 8 to 16 months, and production of 680 words from 16 to 30 months, were derived from a norming study of 1,789 children between the ages of 8 and 30 months using the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories (Fenson et al., 1993). The norms are available in the form of a database program, LEX, for MS-DOS-based computers.     

IS NONDEFECTIVELY JUSTIFIED TRUE BELIEF KNOWLEDGE?

The traditional conception of knowledge as justified true belief is refuted in two famous counterexamples by Edmund L. Gettier. Roderick M. Chisholm has attempted to rescue a version of the traditional conception by distinguishing between defective and nondefective kinds of justification, and redefining knowledge more specifically as nondefectively justified true belief. Chisholm's revised definition avoids Gettier's counterexamples, but goes too far in the opposite direction, imposing conditions that are too narrow and not jointly necessary for knowledge. Chisholm's definition excludes some claims that intuitively constitute genuine knowledge¹ by entailing that if a true belief is invalidated as knowledge when defectively justified by a total body of evidence that also makes evident at least one false proposition, then no knowledge whatsoever can be supported by the same evidence. An alternative analysis of knowledge is proposed, according to which the potential loophole between the state of affairs that justifies belief in a proposition, and the state of affairs that makes the proposition true, permitted by the traditional concept of knowledge and discovered by Gettier's counterexamples, is closed by redefining knowledge as semantically-epistemically evidentially relevant justified true belief.     

Wise: Web Interface for Statistics Education

The Web Interface for Statistics Education (WISE) project includes a World-Wide Web site to support the teaching of introductory social-science statistics courses. The site provides easy access to data bases, archived discussion lists, electronic journals, links to other sites focused on relevant statistics topics, and it includes a prototype of an on-line tutorial. The tutorial, which is the focus of the current paper, is designed to capitalize on special capabilities offered by the Web. The easy linkage between Web pages provides support for a highly interactive tutorial, which uses “failure-based” learning and immediate feedback. Students rated the tutorial as easy to use and indicated that it would have improved their initial statistics course.     

Content validity: A neglected strategy for developing managerial selection tests?

There is a lack of quick, valid, and cost effective methods for selection of low-and mid-level managerial personnel. Using content-valid methods to develop managerial selection instruments may reap substantial benefits for applicants as well as for the organizations using such tools. To this end, based upon extensive job analysis, a content-valid managerial selection test was developed. Criterion-based validity collected on the new instrument suggested that an instrument developed using content-valid procedures can also show acceptable levels of criterion validity.     

Rights, justice, and duties to provide assistance: a critique of Regan's theory of rights

In his monograph, The Case for Animal Rights (University of California Press; 1983), Tom Regan seeks to develop an alternative moral theory to utilitarianism, and to apply it to the question of animal rights, including animal experimentation. Here Jamieson presents an overview of Regan's theory and critically examines areas in which he, Jamieson, believes it to be most problematic. He argues that Regan's theory encounters difficulties in its account of our duties to render assistance and its principles for overriding rights. Jamieson concludes that Regan has failed to develop a "compelling and dramatic alternative to utilitarian theories" and that most plausible revisions of his theory lead back in the direction of utilitarianism.     

Intentional explanations and radical theories of education

In this paper I argue that Marxist studies of schools have overlooked the power of intentional explanations to explain schooling practices and policies. This oversight is at least in part due to many radical analyses failing to distinguish between explaining the acquisition and persistence of beliefs and determining the social consequences that follow from acting on beliefs. I further contend that radical researchers examining schooling practices must develop a more rigorous and refined conception of capitalist class interests.     

Informant impressions of retardate personality: reliability with extraversion, emotionality, toughmindedness

To assess extraversion, emotionality and toughmindedness among retarded persons with limited linguistic skills the 18-item Personal Reactions and Habits Questionnaire (PRHQ) was created. The responses of 2 interviewed informants, each well acquainted with a target person, are summed to obtain scores for each of the personality factors identified by Eysenck and Eysenck (1975). To establish the reliability of this procedure 4 interviewers inquired of 35 informants about a total of 54 target Ss of a wide range of mental retardation and living variously in the natural home, a group home or in a large state-operated institution. One-week test-retest reliability coefficients, e.g. r=0.93 for Extraversion, r=0.86 for Emotionality and r=0.92 for Toughmindedness, suggest the PRHQ to be a promising instrument for research on personality of Ss unable to provide self-reports. The possible use of the PRHQ to assess concordance of self-reports with personality impressions of others is also discussed.