At the highest level, this dissertation is a case study on how bias can become encoded into the tools used to measure a construct and into the very definition of the construct itself. In this case, the construct is spatial ability. This dissertation focuses on the validity and accuracy of spatial tests and illuminates gender bias that is…

Level of state test anxiety and depression were related to encoding strategy (imagery versus sematic instructions) in a study of sentence memory. Subjects were 80 female undergraduate students. Negative effects for test anxiety were found in both strategy conditions. Negative effects were found for depression when the semantic encoding strategy…

A systematic research program will study the cumulative effects of selected instructional variables on learning a spatial visualization task. The goal of the research is to identify instructional variables that will improve the performance of female students on the Aircraft Instrument Comprehension (AIC) test. The AIC program is intended to teach…