Getting animals to understand the experimenter’s instructions

A general procedure is described whereby animals may be trained to understand certain instructions posed by the E. Animals trained in this way could then provide the answers to some questions that have often been dismissed as anthropomorphic and untestable, such as: Are conditioned reinforcers sought or avoided because of what they signal or for their own sake? Can animals distinguish between “before” and “after”? Can they recall? Special emphasis is paid to some issues in the learned taste aversion literature.     

Effects of administrative scheduling and directions upon student ratings of instruction

Using temporal proximity of instructor/course evaluations to critical in-course events, together with psychological set provided via directions, the present investigation sought to assess (1) the appropriateness of within-course time-series analyses for instructor ratings, and (2) the potency of inducing rater perceptions of the rating process as an interactive variable in course evaluations. A 2 × 2 (temporal proximity by psychological set) factorial design used students enrolled in two sections of an undergraduate course in educational psychology as subjects. Using both midterm and final examination time periods as data collection points, the results of this investigation suggested that preexamination instructor/course evaluations tend to be more favorable than postexamination evaluations, and that a specific positive psychological set prior to evaluations tends to produce more favorable evaluations than very general, brief instructions.