A Review Of Geraldine Jonçich's The Sane Positivist: A Biography Of Edward L. Thorndike

This book review, unfinished at the author's death, examines in historical context Thorndike's law of effect, his Animal Intelligence monograph of 1898, and related works on learning and behavior.     

Comparison of four short forms of the French adaptation of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale – Fourth Edition (WAIS-IV)

IntroductionThe Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Adults - 4^th Edition (WAIS-IV) is widely used in France and French-speaking countries for clinical assessment and research. This scale has excellent metric qualities; there is ample evidence of the validity and reliability of its scores. However, it takes 60 to 90 min to complete the full test. That can be problematic in research where time is limited and when examining very disturbed patients. In such cases, a short form of the WAIS-IV may be useful. Unfortunately, no short form of the French version of WAIS-IV has yet been validated using the standardization sample.ObjectiveThe aim of the present study was to identify an abbreviated form of WAIS-IV with sufficient validity and reliability to replace, in some cases, the full test.MethodFour short forms were developed taking into account the fidelity and the correlation with the FIQ of the subtests included in each of form. The metric qualities the four short forms were compared using the standardization data of the French WAIS-IV. The standardization was done using the results of a sample of 876 individuals representative of the French population from 16 to 79 years 11 months.ResultsThe analyzes showed that a short form including Information, Matrices, Arithmetic and Code provides a fairly good estimate of the FIQ. The fidelity of the estimated IQ was 0.94 and its correlation with the FIQ was 0.91. However, the average of the absolute differences between the IQ calculated with this short form and the IQ calculated with the full form was 4.24 points, with a standard deviation of 3.15 points. These differences could lead to misidentification of some individuals tested with the short form.ConclusionThe proposed short form provides a sufficient approximation of the FIQ to be used in research where the collective results are more important than those of individuals. This short form, however, does not provide an IQ measure as robust as the full form. It should therefore be used with caution only when using the full form is not possible.     

Spiritual development: understanding and importance in schools: an analysis based on statements made by school directors from Valparaíso,Chile

Chile’s General Law of Education states that one of the purposes of education is the spiritual development of all its schooled population. Furthermore, guidelines in Chile’s education system place school directors as key players in student’s learning. This article presents the results of a research involving school directors from Valparaíso, Chile. The aim of this research was to identify how directors of secular and religious schools understand their students’ spiritual development. We studied this aspect in particular through semi-structured interviews conducted with 20 participants. Results show that directors understand spirituality as a typically human ability that can be strengthened in schools and, thus, they believe it to be highly important in schools. In addition, they see a strong relation between spiritual development and ethical and moral development. This study also shows differences in how secular and religious schools’ directors understand this relation. This opens the way for more in-depth analysis regarding spiritual development in Chile’s education system, especially considering that directors generally believe it to be a part of a holistic and quality education.