The ultimate goal of physics education research (PER) is to develop a theoretical framework to understand and improve the learning process. In this journey of discovery, assessment serves as our headlamp and alpenstock. It sometimes detects signals in student mental structures, and sometimes presents the difference between expert understanding and…

This study investigated the relation between victimization and victimization-related distress and implicit social-cognitive processing. Eighty-seven 9-13 year old children completed measures of victimization experience and social cognitive processing tasks, including the emotional Stroop task and the self-concept Implicit Association Test (IAT).…

Cognitive models of anxiety and panic suggest that symptom reduction during treatment should be preceded by changes in cognitive processing, including modifying the anxious schema. The current study tested these hypotheses by using a repeated measures design to evaluate whether the trajectory of change in automatic panic associations over a…

Approximately one third of the population of Louisiana is African American. According to federal reports, Blacks in Louisiana receive a poorer quality of healthcare compared to the White population. Occupational therapy is a profession of predominately White, middle class females who report in surveys that they are not adequately prepared to…

The associative behavior of 24 male chronic schizophrenics and 24 normal control subjects (male) equated for age and educational level was investigated. Free and restricted associations were obtained to analyze the organizational aspects of associative behavior as well as the number of unique or common responses per task, response repetitions…

The report describes the characteristics and usage of a computer program, the Relatedness Coefficient Matrix Program (RCMAT), designed to summarize associative responses given to verbal stimuli by individual respondents and by groups of respondents. The computer program uses the response distributions for individuals, and the pooled response…

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) requires responding to category contrasts such as young versus old, male versus female, and pleasant versus unpleasant. In introducing the IAT, A. G. Greenwald, D. E. McGhee, and J. L. K. Schwartz (1998) proposed that IAT measures reflect mental structures involving the nominal features of the IAT's categories…

Implicit measures such as the Implicit Association Test (OAT) have recently become popular as tools in research on evaluative conditioning. The reason is that these measures are thought to be impervious to changes in valence that are due to conscious propositional knowledge about the relation between the conditioned stimulus (CS) and the…

Numeric values of psychological measures often have an arbitrary character before research has grounded their meanings, thereby providing what S. J. Messick (1995) called consequential validity (part of which H. Blanton and J. Jaccard now identify as metric meaningfulness). Some measures are predisposed by their design to acquire meanings easily,…

Cross-validation and standardization of a multiple choice analogy test designed to identify children who rely on free association rather than analogical reasoning. (Author)

Background: Interest in the interactive effects of prior knowledge and text structure on learning from text is increasing but experimental manipulations of knowledge and structure variables often produce findings that do not help teachers to select expository texts for students. Aims: We aimed to extend the ecological validity of previous findings…

Prior research has indicated that rumination contributes to the maintenance or intensification of depressive symptoms among adults. This study examined associations between rumination and depressive symptoms in early adolescence. Using a short-term longitudinal design, we evaluated relations between subtypes of rumination and both depressive…

Determining students' knowledge structure is important for assessing what a learner knows about a domain of knowledge. Traditional assessment methods are not always appropriate for exploring students' knowledge structure and changes during the learning period. This study investigates how the existing knowledge structure of the learners interacts…

Eight sentences with high associative connections between their major elements (hi-m sentences) were generated from the Michigan Restricted Association Norms (Riegel, 1965a, b). Eight additional sentences with no or low association connections (lo-m sentences) were derived from the hi-m sentences by a scrambling procedure. All sentences were of…