Sex in College Relationships: The Role Television Plays in Emerging Adults’ Sexual Expectations in Relationships

The purpose of this study was to determine whether emerging adults use relationship television to form their expectations for sexual interaction in romantic relationships. Considering emerging adulthood is a unique period of development providing opportunities to experiment with adult identities, and relationship television contains multiple consistent messages about gender roles in sexual relationships, we questioned whether emerging adults’ relationship television viewing may be related to their sexual expectations in relationships. Our findings indicated women's relationship television viewing was associated with expecting more sexual interaction in their relationship. Men's sexual expectations were moderated by perceived realism. Men who watched more relationship television, and perceived that television to be less realistic, reported expecting less frequent sexual interaction.     

Theory and practice of teaching for transfer

Transfer of teaching is central to education. In this article, the evolution of the sole viable theory of transfer—the theory of common elements—is traced from its mentalistic beginnings, through the behaviorist view of elements as stimuli and responses related by the mechanism of conditioning, to the contemporary view of elements as mental representations, knowledge, and strategies operated on by cognitive mechanisms including automatization, inferential reasoning, and metacognitive monitoring. Second, the cognitive theory of elements and mechanisms is used to answer three educationally crucial questions: (1) How do students select, from all they have learned, particular knowledge and skills for use in new situations? (2) What determines the utility of the knowledge and skills selected? (3) When selected knowledge and skills are not useful, what determines whether and how learners cope? Third, the authors identify what they view as needed refinements in experimental methods of studying transfer, in the theory of common elements, in basic and applied research, and in the uses of technology in education.     

Supplementing floundering text with adjunct displays

Three experiments compared the learning potential of text versus outline and matrix displays. In Experiments 1 and 2, college students read or heard a passage about fish and then studied the text, an outline, or a matrix. In Experiment 3, students heard a passage about wildcats, and then studied text, outline, or matrix displays. In all experiments, the text, outline, and matrix formats were informationally equivalent. However, the two-dimensional matrix appeared more computationally efficient than the linear organized text or outline because it (a) positioned related information about fish or wildcats in closer proximity so that local relations within a single category (such as size) were learned, and (b) organized information spatially so that global relations across categories (such as size and diet) were learned. The learning potential of text, outline, and matrix displays was also examined in combination with variations in thematic organization, amount of study time, and time of testing. The most important and consistent findings were that (a) outline and matrix displays produced greater relational learning than the text, and (b) matrix displays produced greater relational learning than outlines.     

Attitudes of Western Australian students towards microcomputers

A sample of primary and secondary school students in Western Australia responded to a 20-item questionnaire designed to measure attitudes towards microcomputers. Favourable attitudes were found, with no noticeable gender differences. Attitudes of younger students were slightly more positive than those of older students. The attitudes of students having a computer at home were more positive than those of students without a home computer. The results generally support those found in other studies from the USA and the UK where the same questions were asked.     

Rating of scholarly journals by chairpersons in the social sciences

Names of journals falling in the areas of anthropology, economics, geography, history, philosophy, political science, and sociology were mailed to department chairpersons in these disciplines in U.S. and Canadian universities. Chairpersons were asked to assign numerical ratings using a 1–5 point scale in order to represent the quality of those journals they were familiar with. They were also asked to add journals which they thought should have been included in the original list. The resulting data provide (1) a basis for classifying journals into categories representing their visibility relative to other journals within a particular discipline, and (2) provide average rankings of quality for individual journals. The paper also reviews options generally available in assessing journal quality and describes possible use of such data in the context of the university, particularly in respect to personnel decisions.