Attitudinal effects as a function of undergraduate statistics course design: Personalized (self-directed) vs. traditional

Two undergraduate statistics course designs were compared for their effects on attitudes involving perceived competency with respect to course content, the concept of psychology as a science, the social atmosphere within a course and the interest and value in the area of statistics and research design. One design involved the traditional format of lecture-laboratory-discussion while the other was modeled after Keller's personalized program involving the application of principles of behavioral analysis. The Keller design produced more positive attitudes with respect to perceived competency and the notion of psychology as a science. The attitudes toward the social atmosphere and the interest and value in the course were higher at the beginning of the personalized design and did not change as a result of the students' experiences in the courses. The outcomes seem to be a result of both the specific course design and the context or learning system in which the student functions.     

EFFECTS OF EMPIRICAL OPTION WEIGHTING ON RELIABILITY AND VALIDITY OF AN ACADEMIC APTITUDE TEST1

Item options of shortened forms of the GRE Verbal and Quantitative tests were empirically weighted by two variants of a method originally attributed to Guttman (1941). When compared with formula scores, it was found that tests scored with the empirical weights were more reliable but less valid when correlated with undergraduate GPA. A factor analysis revealed large increases in variance accounted for by the first factor. It was suggested that the weighting procedures used tended to capitalize on omitting behavior which, although a highly reliable tendency, may be invalid.     

Being Subjective about Autistic Thinking and Learning to Learn

In this paper, we discuss the deviant pattern of the development of thinking in autism and outline our thesis that the problem with autistic memory is in developing a personal episodic memory, and that this difficulty arises because of a deficit in the development of an experiencing self, which we have termed (after Brewer, 1986) an ‘ego‐self. We discuss constraints which we suggest result in learnable thinking skills remaining domain specific: difficulties with (i) language, (ii) coding, storage and retrieval of information and (iii) the role of emotions. We discuss what ‘improving the thinking’ of individuals with autism would entail and draw implications regarding fundamental requirements and caveats of teaching thinking for all individuals.