Teaching minority high school students to recruit helpers to attain personal and educational goals

Recruiting help from mentors and other potential helpers is a promising strategy for helping disadvantaged and minority youths meet their personal and educational goals. Three African-American high school seniors participated in a project designed to evaluate the effectiveness of training procedures that would allow them to ask for help in attaining educational and other personal goals. A behavioral training procedure that included instructional materials, role-play practice, praise, and feedback was used. Targeted skills included goal setting and 30 responses involved in the process of meeting with a potential helper. Role-play situations were used to evaluate participants' help-recruiting skills before and after training. Participants increased their help-recruiting skills from an average of 38% during baseline, to an average of 75% after training. Self-reported measures of goal attainment suggested that the students benefited from the training. Implications for mentoring programs designed to increase minority students' opportunities to reach educational goals were discussed.     

Duration estimates of two information processing components

Adult humans attempted to make quick responses to the first of two sequentially presented visual stimuli. At short interstimulus intervals (less than about 100 msec) accuracy was impaired by a different second stimulus and this was hypothesized to reflect the activity of an information processing component concerned with stimulus registration. At longer interstimulus intervals (up to approximately 350 msec) reaction time was inhibited by a different second stimulus and this was assumed to reflect the activity of a second component concerned with decision. The stimulus registration component was insensitive to variations in the complexity of the task, while the decision component was found to be greater for a task requiring recognition (is the current stimulus the same as an earlier one?) than for one merely requiring choice (what is the current stimulus?). This functional independence and the sizeable difference in the temporal range of susceptibility led to the conclusion that two distinct information processing components were involved.     

RITALIN VS. RESPONSE COST IN THE CONTROL OF HYPERACTIVE CHILDREN: A WITHIN-SUBJECT COMPARISON

A within-subject comparison was made of the effects of methylphenidate (Ritalin) and response cost in reducing the off-task behavior of two boys, 7 and 8 years of age, who had been diagnosed as having an attentional deficit disorder with hyperactivity. Several dosages of Ritalin (5 to 20 mg/day) were evaluated with the results indicating varying effects of the drug for both children. Response cost (with free-time as the reinforcer) was superior to Ritalin in raising levels of on-task behavior and in improving academic performance.     

Skewness and asymmetry of distributions

The ‘skewness’ of a distribution, a poorly-defined term, is conventionally deemed to be invariant under linear transformations. A comparison is made of three criteria of it: the sign of odd central moments; the several relationships of the mean, the median and the mode; and asymmetry proper which is the set of ratios of the probability densities of all pairs of points equidistant above and below some arbitrary point, usually the principal mode. Some useful general relationships are discussed. The skeness of convolutions is briefly discussed. A class of distributions is identified for which the skewness of the minimum ofk competing processes is independent ofk. It has importance in the parametric study of survivorship.     

Perceived control in continuous loud noise

The effects of two types of perceived control were assessed for performance during and following exposure to continuous loud noise at 90 dBC. Subjects performed a tracking task during exposure and the Stroop test in the period following exposure. Control could be effected either (1) by attenuating the intensity of the noise or (2) by reducing the difficulty of the tracking task. In both cases subjects were encouraged not to exercise control. Performance in treatments involving loud (90 dBC) and soft (55 dBC) noise served as baseline conditions. Perceived control of task difficulty accentuated the tendency for root-mean-square error to rise during the tracking task. There were no significant effects of noise intensi ty on tracking performance. Loud noise reduced the incidence of errors in the Stroop test but perceived control failed to influence this effect. The results are discussed in terms of the generality of perceived control phenomena.     

Verbal ability and mental processing speed

The notion that verbal ability is related to mental processing speed was examined using tasks that systematically varied in semantic content. Subjects' reaction times were measured in five tasks involving arrow matching, physical identity word matching, or taxonomic identity word matching. The findings indicated that matching tasks using different decision rules and different stimuli were all related to verbal ability. In fact, reaction time for subjects required to judge whether two arrows pointed in the same direction was the best predictor of verbal ability. One explanation of the results is that speed of information processing (a general factor) may be the important component of verbal ability which is measured by seemingly different matching tasks.     

Effects of schedule and magnitude of reinforcement under conditions of thirst motivation

In contrast to a recent finding (Macdonald, G. E., & De Toledo, L. Learning and Motivation, 1974, 5, 288–298.) the results of three experiments investigating various partial reinforcement (PRF) manipulations under conditions of thirst motivation demonstrated strong similarity to analogous manipulations involving food reward. Specifically, for animals receiving water reinforcement, PRF was shown to generate greater resistance to extinction than continuous reinforcement (Expt 1 & 3), the schedule of reinforcement was shown to interact with level of acquisition (Expt 1 and 2), and the magnitude of the partial reinforcement extinction effect was shown to be a function of reward magnitude (Expt 3). These results provide strong evidence that mechanisms which operate in partial reinforcement situations are highly similar, regardless of the type of appetitive reinforcement.