High School Value Climate as Related to Preferential Treatment of Athletes

This paper focuses on the importance of the high school value climate as a mediating variable in the analysis of behavior associated with sport participation. The findings suggest that athletes are accorded preferential treatment in those schools where sport is an important prestige-granting activity. In addition, the findings showed that the athletes were somewhat more conventional than the nonathletes; however, this conventionality was not associated with the school value climate.     

Some Attitudes Associated with Sport Participation among Junior High School Females

This paper focuses on young female participants and their self-perceptions. The findings indicate that self-perceived characteristics of ambition, competition, strength, and speed were more evident for participants than nonparticipants. However, there was no significant difference between participants and nonparticipants concerning characteristics of happiness, affection, femininity, sensitivity, gentleness, and attractiveness. The data also indicated that the young female participants have not developed a highly professionalized orientation toward competition, yet they are more likely to be concerned about playing well than are nonparticipants. The findings suggest that even by early adolescence either selectivity and/or socialization differences are emerging between female participants and nonparticipants.     

Teaching cause-effect text structure through social studies content to at-risk second graders

This study evaluated the effectiveness of a comprehension program integrated with social studies instruction designed for at-risk second graders. The program included instruction in cause-effect text structure, emphasizing clue words, generic questions, graphic organizers, and the close analysis of specially constructed cause-effect target paragraphs. This program was compared (a) to a content-only program that focused only on social studies and did not include text structure instruction and (b) to a no-instruction control. Fifteen classroom teachers, randomly assigned to treatment, provided the instruction. The program improved the comprehension of instructional cause-effect texts, and there were transfer effects on some comprehension measures. The performance of the 2 instructed groups did not differ on any of the content measures, indicating that such integrated instruction can be accomplished without a loss in the amount of content acquired. This study supports our previous findings on the effectiveness of explicit instruction at the primary-grade level.     

An application of document filtering in an operational system

This paper describes an applied document filtering system embedded in an operational watch center that monitors disease outbreaks worldwide. At the initial time of this writing, the system effectively supported monitoring of 23 geographic regions by filtering documents in several thousand daily news sources in 11 different languages. This paper describes the filtering algorithm, statistical procedures for estimating Precision and Recall in an operational environment, summarizes operational performance data and suggests lessons learned for other applications of document filtering technology. Overall, these results are interpreted as supporting the general utility of document filtering and information retrieval technology and offers recommendations for future applications of this technology.