Three papers by the president of the National Federation of the Blind are presented. The first, "A Definition of Blindness," examines definitions of blindness, asserting the advantages of a functional or sociological definition over a physical or medical definition. He cites harm in legal distinctions between partial and full blindness and between…

As part of its school restructuring work with states, the National Governors' Association sponsored a March 1988 working meeting of experts to define common issues confronting educators and policymakers. Besides initiating dialogue between these groups, the meeting concentrated discussion on early state and district efforts. This essay summarizes…

Early research demonstrating an association between success and the male stereotype and between failure and the female stereotype, and the Bayesian analysis of attribution theory provided the bases for predictions about the effects of gender and performance outcomes on probability estimates of future success. The relation between gender…

Organizational socialization is the process by which a person learns the values, norms, and required behaviors that allow an individual to function as a member of an organization. The individual has expectations of job content, job context, and career expectations. Reality shock occurs when a newcomer's expectations differ from experiences in the…

This exploratory study was designed to investigate the explanatory and predictive power of the transaction between affect and cognition in the account of transitions across developmental stages within various domains. Subjects were 21 undergraduate college students from a course on intellectual development taught at Tufts University…

Grandmothering has been described as a "tenuous" role in modern families in that grandparenting is specified as a symbolic linkage but is ambiguous in terms of behavioral expectations. This paper addresses the following question: How do role relational partners modulate their own behavior when there is ambiguity in expectations for…

Evaluation errors may be unintentional, caused by incompetence, or intentional caused by mendacity. This report is concerned, not with incompetence, but with the production of educational assessments flawed by an evaluator's deceit. The purposes of the paper are: (1) to identify conditions under which people purposely distort evaluation reports,…

A summary is presented of a study addressing three major questions concerning student mediation of teacher expectancy effects upon the performance and self-concept of elementary school students. These questions were: (1) Are there developmental differences in children's capacity to perceive differential treatment (toward others as well as…

Both black and white children's reactions to black adults are studies for how the status characteristics of adults and children affect adults' ability to raise a child's expectations of his own performance on school-like tasks. (Author/KM)

The purpose of this study was to assess the biasing effects of sex of child, level of facial attractiveness, and conduct on teachers' evaluations of the child's attitudes and work habits. (Author)

Highlighted in this study are the relationships between sex and grade level on academic achievement and employment aspirations. A probabilistic response format was used for the research questionnaire which was completed by students in grade 9 and grade 11, and by college freshmen and college juniors. (BJG)

Repeated but unadvised attempts have been made by music educators to relate the Piagetian concept of concrete operational thought to children's understanding of music. The attempts have been focused on the apparent link between the child's detection of invariance in musical patterns and the concept of conservation. These attempts are unadvised…

This study explored the hypotheses that (1) young children told (labeled) directly that they were "patient" by adults would demonstrate more subsequent self-control than children given an irrelevant label, and that (2) adult tester expectations regarding the children's self-control would influence only the subjects given the irrelevant…