Posttrial injections of strychnine sulfate: Facilitation of consolidation or retrieval?

The existing literature demonstrating that animals given strychnine sulfate shortly after training display enhanced retention 24 h later can be interpreted in terms of either consolidation or retrieval processes. A test between these two interpretations failed to support the consolidation interpretation, but did support the retrieval interpretation. It was concluded that (a) a retrieval model provides an adequate interpretation of the facilitation of retention resulting from posttrial injections of strychnine, and (b) an unambiguous demonstration that strychnine enhances processes of consolidation has yet to be offered.     

Some correlates of culture shock among American tourists in Africa

The effects on culture shock of prior travel experience, feelings of internal/external control, and intolerance of ambiguity were examined in American tourists to Africa. Participants, 42 members of a university sponsored six week tour of East Africa, ranged widely in age and prior travel experience. Hostility toward Africans, withdrawal from cross cultural contact, and overidentification with America were assessed with ratings by tour leaders and by participant self reports. Prior travel experience does not correlate significantly with culture shock, a finding confounded in this study by age. Older tourists had more prior travel but also experienced greater culture shock. Those less tolerant of ambiguity experienced greater culture shock. Internal/external control feelings did not correlate significantly with culture shock. Combining personality and prior travel in multiple regression did not significantly improve prediction of any of the culture shock manifestations over that of the best single predictor. Results are discussed primarily in terms of differences between the cross cultural experience of tourists and that of other groups in which culture shock has been studied.     

Interactive Cross-Language Document Selection

The problem of finding documents written in a language that the searcher cannot read is perhaps the most challenging application of cross-language information retrieval technology. In interactive applications, that task involves at least two steps: (1) the machine locates promising documents in a collection that is larger than the searcher could scan, and (2) the searcher recognizes documents relevant to their intended use from among those nominated by the machine. This article presents the results of experiments designed to explore three techniques for supporting interactive relevance assessment: (1) full machine translation, (2) rapid term-by-term translation, and (3) focused phrase translation. Machine translation was found to better support this task than term-by-term translation, and focused phrase translation further improved recall without an adverse effect on precision. The article concludes with an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the evaluation framework used in this study and some remarks on implications of these results for future evaluation campaigns.     

Do expenditures other than instructional expenditures affect graduation and persistence rates in American higher education?

During the last two decades, median instructional spending per full-time equivalent (FTE) student at American 4-year colleges and universities has grown at a slower rate than median spending per FTE student in a number of other expenditure categories, including academic support, student services and research. Our paper uses institutional level panel data and a variety of econometric approaches, including unconditional quantile regression methods, to analyze whether these non-instructional expenditure categories influence graduation and first-year persistence rates of undergraduate students.     

Cultural capital and its effects on education outcomes

In this study we distinguished between two forms of cultural capital, one that is static, representing the highbrow activities and practices of parents, and one that is relational, representing cultural interactions and communication between children and their parents. We used data for 28 countries from the 2000 Programme for International Student Assessment to examine whether these two types of cultural capital were associated with students’ reading literacy, sense of belonging at school, and occupational aspirations, after controlling for traditional measures of socioeconomic status. We examined whether one type of cultural capital had stronger effects than the other and whether their effects differed across outcomes and across countries. The results provide compelling evidence that dynamic cultural capital has strong effects on students’ schooling outcomes, while static cultural capital has more modest effects.