A true elaboration of educational goals will include a set of both more and less well-structured aims, corresponding to behavioral objectives and subjectives, which can be tested respectively by direct methods and by less direct methods such as the native speaker or Turing tests. (Author/LS)

Objective: The use of standardized patients in Objective Structured Clinical Examinations in the assessment of psychiatric residents has increased in recent years. The aim of this study is to investigate the experience of psychiatry residents and examiners with standardized patients in Iran. Method: Final-year residents in psychiatry participated…

Disciplinary alternative schools have a reputation as gateways to the juvenile and criminal justice systems. The authors conducted an evaluation of an intervention (Strategies for Success) designed to divert seventh-, eighth-, and ninth-grade alternative school students from this gateway. They used propensity score matching and a multivariate…

Now that many credentialing exams are being routinely administered by computer, new computer-based test designs, along with item response theory models, are being aggressively researched to identify specific designs that can increase the decision consistency and accuracy of pass-fail decisions. The purpose of this study was to investigate the…

The ability of preschool age children to perform generalized relational matching to sample tasks with and without an overt mediating stimulus was examined. This experiment was a direct replication of a study by Lowenkron (1984) and examined a behavioral model relevant to complex human behavior that he later came to call "joint control." Children…

A four-part experiment was carried out to study the relationship between the time course of object-feature perception and the time course of retrieval of object information from memory. The experiment consisted of 2 perceptual matching tasks, and 2 perceptual recognition tasks. In all 4 tasks, participants provided speeded judgments of the…

Regular testing can serve as an incentive for students to keep up with their readings, but the time and effort involved in composing and grading frequent tests can serve as an equally strong disincentive to time-strapped instructors. We describe a distorted-item (DI) test that simply requires excerpting sentences or phrases from the assigned…

We tested the effect of multiple exemplar instruction on the transfer of stimulus function for unfamiliar pictures across listener responses (i.e., matching and pointing) and speaker responses (i.e., pure tacts and impure tacts). Three preschool students, who were 3- and 4-year-old males and did not have the listener to speaker component of the…

Cognitive performance is affected by an individual's characteristics and the environment, as well as by the nature of the task and the amount of practice at it. Mental performance tests range in complexity and include subjective estimates of mood, simple objective tests (reaction time), and measures of complex performance that require decisions to…

The matching law was used to analyze whether the proportion of shots taken from two- or three-point range would match the proportional reinforcement rates produced by those shots when the reinforcement rate of three-point shooting was changed. Rule changes in 1994 and 1997 altered the distance of the three-point line in the National Basketball…

Behavior analysts have offered accounts of the behavior involved in matching to sample and delayed matching to sample. But until recently have not offered a behavioral analysis of generalized matching-to-sample. The concept of joint control, however, seems especially suited to such an analysis The present study used a joint-control procedure to…

It is difficult to develop objective measures of basketball skills. Based on modelling of coaches' selections for girls' basketball teams, the researchers conclude that more than one combination of objective measures define team selection. Methodology and results are discussed. (Author/JL)

A true-false measure concerning the interpretation of intelligence quotients (IQ) is presented. The correct responses to the 10 items, and a brief explanation of each, are also included. The author attempts to reveal many misconceptions about the interpretation of IQ scores. (DWH)

Matching-to-sample procedures were used to assess picture representation skills of seven severely retarded, nonverbal adolescents. The results suggested that photo-object matching may be facilitated by using cut-out figures rather than the complete rectangular photo. (Author)