A taxonomy of decision behavior styles (independence/dependence, active/passive, insightful/not) tested with 372 career counseling clients was supported by similar structure analysis and confirmatory factor analysis. Counselors were more likely to be satisfied with decisions of clients they perceived to be insightful. (SK)

A definition and typology of peer assessment between students in higher education is proposed, and the theoretical underpinnings of the method are discussed, based on a review of both process and outcome studies. These studies suggest that peer assessment is of adequate reliability and validity in many situations. (SLD)

Describes the temporal consistency of school classification observed in the Kentucky, and secondarily in the Charlotte-Mecklinberg (North Carolina), school-based performance award programs. Data from the Kentucky Department of Education show the extent to which temporal inconsistency could be due to measurement error. (SLD)

Identifying types of student aggression is essential to providing early and effective interventions; a model is presented for subtyping childhood aggression. Reactive and proactive aggression are discussed with examples of teacher observations and counselor interviews. Behavioral indicators of subtypes are presented. Intervening with each type is…

Classifies information-retrieval applications into three groups depending on the correspondence between a user's request and the queries posed to the document base. Argues that the mapping of requests, on a semantic level, to formalized queries, on a lexical level, determines the range of retrieval effectiveness. (Author/LRW)

Argues that the Woesian three domain view of life should replace the five kingdom taxonomic scheme presented in most general biology texts and courses. Presents evidence for employing the three domain scheme and a related activity for classroom use. Contains 11 references. (WRM)

Proposes a taxonomy of functions for direct reports of speech (and of writing and thought) in focus-group discussions. Reported speech both depicts the experience of the original utterance and detaches the reported utterance from the reporting speaker. (Author/VWL)

Considers a general problem of combining the classifications or predictions of local information systems into a single system. Introduces a new approach for solving an aggregation problem where a decision maker needs to classify an observation based on group-membership predictions coming from multiple experts, and describes results from empirical…

Describes a teaching experiment conducted over a period of four consecutive days with 13 fourth grade students who had already completed a unit of fractions to determine whether problematic size was the ordering criteria. Concludes that children can indeed order fractions as they do natural numbers. (Contains 11 references.) (ASK)

Introduces this special issue of the journal and reports on new directions in the research that began with code switching, but increasingly has come to include other types of language contact phenomena. The articles in the issue report on analyses and explanations for a variety of outcomes in bilingual production. (Author/VWL)

Describes a system of categories to subdivide the gifted and talented population into the following more homogeneous subgroups: mild, moderate, high, exceptional, and extreme. Based on the metric system, each of the five levels, including the minimum threshold, selects the top 10% of the previous level. (Author/CR)

Describes the classification of minorities developed by J. Ogbu as autonomous, voluntary (immigrant), and involuntary (nonimmigrant) and explains Ogbu's cultural ecological theory of minority school performance. Implications of the theory for pedagogy are explored. The typology of minority groups is regarded as a heuristic device for analysis.…

Five experiments involving 173 college students show that people frequently do not apply the category inclusion rule when evaluating categorical arguments involving natural categories and a single nonexplainable predicate. Judgments tended to be proportional to the similarity between premise and conclusion categories. (SLD)

Evaluates the retrieval performance of an algorithm that automatically categorizes medical documents, which consists in assigning an International Code of Disease (ICD) based on well-known information retrieval techniques. Reports on experimental results that tested precision using a database of over 20,000 medical documents. (Author/LRW)

Reflects on Needham's findings on infants' object recognition and segregation. Examines the role for perceptual bias in explaining infant performance, places Needham's studies in historical perspective, and assesses their theoretical significance. Discusses the merits of positing different kinds of information sources for object segregation, and…