Reinforcement schedules,effort vs. Ability attributions,and persistence

Two treatment studies of special education students markedly helpless with regard to arithmetic are reported. The first experiment compared an attribution retraining (Dweck, 1975) treatment to a control treatment matched to it in schedule of successes and failures. Both the attribution retraining and control treatments proved effective in alleviating helplessness, but they were not differentially effective. The second experiment compared the effects of three success-failure schedules (100% success, 76.9% success, and 46.2% success) on attributions and persistence. Only the 76.9% success schedule increased attributions of failures to lack of effort and improved behavioral persistence in the face of failure. The results were interpreted as supporting one aspect of Weiner's (1979) theory, which implies that an infrequently experienced event, i.e., failure, will be attributed to an unstable cause, i.e., lack of effort.     

Developing a Strong Program of Construct Validation: A Test Anxiety Example

What would a strong program of construct validation look like for the concept of test anxiety? What are the components of strong validation programs? In particular, how does structural equation modeling fit into such a program?     

Radiation fields from polygonal sources

The calculation of the radiation field D(x, y, z) produced by a uniform polygonal source is of considerable practical importance. Fock showed that there are advantages in replacing the traditional surface integral by a contour integral, using Stokes' theorem. This innovation, however, has not yet penetrated very deeply. It seemed worthwhile, therefore, to systematize the procedure and to show how easily results can be obtained by the Fock method. An incidental conclusion of the paper is that the radiation field from a polygonal source often differs by less than one per cent from the field produced by a circular disk of the same area. Thus the simple disk formula can often be substituted for the more complicated polygonal formula.     

Developing life-role readiness in a multicultural society: Topics to consider

In this paper a conceptual framework for developing life-role readiness in a multicultural society is presented. Life-role readiness is defined as the possession of the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary for effective life-role participation. Life-role salience, cultural influences on life-role salience, and specific activities to foster life-role readiness are addressed. Interventions are identified for each topic.     

Predicting word-spelling difficulty in 7- to 11-year-olds

Some languages have simple grapheme-phoneme codes in which there is a one-to-one mapping, making them easy to teach and learn, while others have more complicated structures and are more difficult for teachers and students. There is now an increasing number of studies which demonstrate that readers in more transparent orthographies such as Italian, Spanish, Turkish, Greek and German have little difficulty in decoding written words, while English children have many more problems. Increasingly, lack of orthographic transparency in English is seen as having a powerful negative effect on the development of literacy skills in English-speaking children. In the present study, the word factors associated with poor spelling in 5 school year-groups (ages 7 to 11 years) are identified as: (a) frequency of the word in the English language, (b) length of the word and (c) a measure of the phoneticity of the word. The concept of word phoneticity is explored and data is presented illustrating the predictive model of spelling. The implications the model has for teaching and learning English are discussed, with particular reference to the beneficial effects that greater orthographic transparency would have for children.