A population of 41 manufacturing salespeople, 32 distributor salespeople, and 24 manufacturers' agents used a 7-point scale to rate 82 selling competencies. The resulting classification groups, in order of importance, are communication skills, customer relations, professionalism, selling skills, problem solving, business maturity, and management…

Studied 16 six-month-old infants to determine whether they organized speech categories around prototypes. Infants correctly sorted novel stimuli over 90 percent of the time. Generalization to novel members of the category was significantly greater after exposure to the prototypical exemplar. (RJC)

Reviews approaches for categorizing outcome criterion measures in the human services. Suggests a multidimensional paradigm based on conceptualizations advocated in the literature. Discusses paradigm's implications for rehabilitation practice. (Author/ABL)

Proposes a new taxonomy for classifying the graphic cues commonly used in visually informative text. Subsumes spatial and mark cueing (lines such as dividers, guidelines, network links, and visual tags) under a new concept called diagraphic cueing. Surveys various forms of graphic cues. (RS)

Discusses findings of a study designed to achieve two goals: (1) determine the affect of peer collaboration on high school biology students' acquisition of concepts related to photosynthesis, and (2) examine interactions in a collaborative peer group situation to determine how these interactions relate to the development of concepts associated…

Describes the use of Stake's Responsive Evaluation Model, a transactionist approach, to evaluate the Distance Education for Literacy Providers (DELP) Course which is a Canadian project designed to assist community-based adult literacy workers acquire necessary skills and knowledge. A taxonomy of major evaluation models is included. (Author/LRW)

Holton critiques Kirkpatrick's four-level evaluation model and presents a new model that accounts for primary intervening variables. Kirkpatrick argues that the criticism fails to account for his model's practical utility. Holton elaborates on the distinction between a model and a taxonomy. (SK)

Forty-eight individuals sorted picture cards according to basic (easy) or superordinate (difficult) categories, while being measured on response time to auditory probes (as an index of attention to the primary task). Subjects without mental retardation allocated more attention to difficult tasks. Those with mental retardation gave similar…

Tested 13-, 16-, and 20-month olds' and 24- and 28-month olds' categorization of global- and basic-level object sets composed of prototypical and nonprototypical exemplars. Findings offer new information on the effects of prototypicality and on the process of differentiation of early global categories into more specific basic-level ones. (DR)

A method for robust canonical discriminant analysis via two robust objective loss functions is discussed. Majorization is used at several stages in the minimization procedure to obtain a monotonically convergent algorithm. A simulation study and empirical data illustrate the procedure. (SLD)

A simulation study compares nonhierarchical clustering capabilities of a class of neural networks using Kohonen learning with a K-means clustering procedure. The focus is on the ability of the procedures to recover correctly the known cluster structure in the data. Advantages and disadvantages of the procedures are reviewed. (SLD)

Results of two studies with 1,635 male offenders on the impact of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 (MMPI-2) on the Megargee offender classification system indicate that the original Megargee rules should not be used to classify MMPI-2s. A new set of classification rules is proposed. (SLD)

This reprint of an 1866 essay by the physician who identified Down's syndrome describes the physical and behavioral patterns that characterize individuals with mental retardation who come from different ethnic groups. This evidence of degeneration crossing racial divisions is seen as support for the idea that the human family has a common origin.…

Investigates a conception of wilderness as the historical mental and physical boundary between humans and the radical/racial others as a way of opening the question of whether all sorts of wilderness are necessarily good. Discusses differences between the classical and romantic views of wilderness. (LZ)

Provides a comprehensive view of active learning based on the premise that learning to do a task via instruction is a cumulative process. Five lesson elements are discussed, around which trainee activities may be designed: motivation, orientation, information, application, and evaluation. (Author/JKP)