Using statistical stereotypes may be a means of improving the effectiveness of information-filtering systems that are based on user profiles. Highlights include information and expert systems that use stereotypes, assigning users to stereotypes, integrating stereotypes into a model for information filtering, and future research. (Author/LRW)

Examines a taxonomy of career decision-making difficulties. A questionnaire was administered to 563 young adults at the beginning of their career decision-making process. The relations among the 10 scales, which represent 10 theoretical categories of difficulties, and those among the items within 2 selected categories, were similar in the 2…

A survey of 100 speech-language pathologists involved in the assessment and treatment of patients with dysarthria investigated their attitudes toward the Darley, Aronson, and Brown (DAB) method of classification. Results indicated that most clinicians, believing it helps in the design of a treatment protocol, used the DAB classification system.…

Two experiments examined how 5- and 10-year-olds revised their category representations when exposed to exemplars that were congruent or incongruent with existing knowledge. Findings indicated that judgments about feature co-occurrent within the learned category were influenced by both stereotypical beliefs and exemplar observation. Stereotypical…

Describes the validation of a taxonomy designed to classify teacher verbal strategies to foster interaction through the Hawaii Interactive Television System operated for distance education at the University of Hawaii. Highlights include Kappa Coefficients; Z-scores; and recommendations for future use. (Author/LRW)

Discusses historical and contemporary influences on changes in special education assessment, emphasizing three persistent themes: accurate classification, fairness to minority students, and special education outcomes. Dunn's contributions to each theme are discussed, along with other influences such as legislation and litigation. Current dynamics…

Uses co-occurrence analysis of INSPEC classification codes and thesaurus terms assigned to medical informatics (biomedical information) journal articles and proceedings papers to reveal a more complete perspective of how information science and information technology (IS/IT) authors view medical informatics. Discusses results of cluster analysis…

Developed a measure of severity of mental retardation in adults, the Level of Activity in Profound/severe Mental Retardation, scale using Rasch analysis as a guide to item selection. Results from using the scale to rate 146 adults with mental retardation support the use of the scale for classification of severe and profound retardation. (SLD)

Using several data sets, the relative performance of the beta binomial model and two more general strong true score models in estimating several indices of classification consistency is examined. It appears that the beta binomial model can provide inadequate fits to raw score distributions compared to more general models. (TJH)

Eight articles discuss Program Theory (PT) construction issues, administrators as applied theorists, tests of PT, using path analysis to develop/evaluate PT, using PT to describe/measure program quality, developing/testing program classification and function theories, a pattern-matching approach to link PT and evaluation data, and linking PT and…

Theoretical and empirical issues relating to haptic exploration and the representation of common objects during haptic classification were investigated in 3 experiments involving a total of 112 college students. Results are discussed in terms of a computational model of human haptic object classification with implications for dextrous robot…

The concept of paraphyly is defined and its importance in the teaching of evolution and taxonomy is discussed. Examples are included to illustrate this concept. A list of 14 references is provided. (CW)

Reviews previous work on producing knowledge by the use of information retrieval or classification schemes, and describes techniques by which hidden knowledge may be retrieved, i.e., serendipity in browsing and use of appropriate search strategies. Possible future methods based on relational indexing or artificial intelligence are also explored.…

Two studies of classification strategies of three and five year olds and adults found that five year olds and adults used different sorting strategies for each of two sorting tasks, whereas three year olds relied on the same strategy for both. Children most successful in producing correct groupings were most likely to modify their strategies…

A solution is offered to problems associated with the inequality in the manipulability of probabilities of classification errors of masters versus nonmasters, based on competency test results. Eschewing the typical arbitrary establishment of observed-score standards below 100 percent, the solution incorporates a self-correction of wrong answers.…