Assesses the effect of delay between an event and new postevent information related to it in six-month-old infants' memory. Three phenomena were studied: memory impairment, memory facilitation, and categorization. Suggests that postevent information has different qualitative effects depending on its timing, and provides a basis for understanding…

Discusses access methods in hypermedia and information retrieval and describes a research project in which similarity measures have been extended to include imprecise matching over different dimensions of structured classification schemes. The semantic similarity of information units forms the basis for the automatic construction of links and is…

Infants were familiarized with plastic animals from one of two categories (land or sea) that were judged similar or variable by adults. Infants were then tested with novel animals from the same or a different category. Thirteen-month-olds in the similar familiarization condition dishabituated to novel animals of a different category and, to a…

The uses and abuses of cut scores are examined. The article demonstrates (1) that cut scores always entail judgment; (2) that cut scores inherently result in misclassification; (3) that cut scores impose an artificial dichotomy on an essentially continuous distribution of knowledge, skill, or ability; and (4) that no true cut scores exist. (SLD)

Proposes a mixture item response model for investigating individual differences in the selection of response categories in multiple choice items. A real data example illustrates how the model can be used to distinguish examinees disproportionately attracted to different types of distractors, and a simulation study evaluates item parameter recovery…

Employees a concept-mapping procedure to develop a classification of young men who have been responsible for one or more teen pregnancies. Results confirm that it is possible to cluster these men into different types according to their motivations and other attributes. Discusses how school counselors may use these results to develop appropriate…

Research on human cognitive abilities and jobs' aptitude demands reveals that the two domains have essentially the same structure. Counselor reluctance to use cognitive assessments may be overcome by addressing the following: Which cognitive abilities should be considered? How should occupations be classified for the purposes of assessing…

Nine experiments examined 6- to 10-month-olds' formation of an abstract category representation for "between." Findings indicated that older, but not younger infants, could form an abstract category representation for "between" when performing in an object-variation version of the between categorization task. Six- to…

A study examined all research articles published in four journals from 1993-2001. Approximately two-thirds of the articles consistently described participants by the diagnostic categories from the 1983 American Association on Mental Retardation (AAMR) diagnostic manual. An average of 10% of the articles described participants in terms of the 1992…

Describes a botany course using active learning and the scientific method in which students learn how to use classification keys and study angiosperm taxonomy. (Contains 14 references.) (YDS)

A social sciences paradigm for defining "wicked problems," which are aggressive but not clearly defined, is applied to the evaluation of college instruction. It is proposed that the construct is useful in planning for college faculty evaluation procedures and that prompt action is needed. (MSE)

Examined diagnostic validity of Part Two of the American Association on Mental Deficiency Adaptive Behavior Scales-School Edition (ABS-SE) for the classification of behavior disorder in elementary school students (N=66). Results indicated overall rate of correct classification was 71.21 percent; using factor scores, the level of correct…

This paper uses biological taxonomies as an analogy to emphasize distinctions among the units of phonetic transcription systems, competence phonologies, and performance phonologies. It points out limitations of the coarticulatory approach and suggests an integrative approach that attempts to avoid tying motor control processes to specific…

The problem of teaching relational discriminations to people with mental retardation is examined. The limitations of several commonly used teaching procedures are discussed and alternative approaches to simple-discrimination learning are described. Results of two preliminary single-subject studies demonstrating the feasibility of these approaches…

Text typologies, such as that of Jean-Michel Adam, that distinguish between narrative, descriptive, explanatory, injunctive, argumentative, and poetic texts offer promising possibilities for instruction of French as a second or foreign language. A number of diverse texts illustrate the potential for study of communicative, lexical, and syntactic…