Reasons for Changing Answers: An Evaluation Using Personal Interviews

Researchers investigating answer changing have consistently found the preponderance of changes on objective items to be from wrong to right, but little is understood about the mechanisms involved in this phenomenon. In this study, personal interviews were combined with instruction in answer-changing research to investigate further the processes involved in answer changing. Students changed answers and gained from changing, with those in the upper two thirds of the classes gaining the most. Each test-taking strategy produced a mean gain, but particular strategies were not significantly correlated with percentage of gain or percentage of change. Most students reported changing answers for thoughtful reasons such as rereading, rethinking, or remembering more information; very few changes were due to clerical errors. For each reason, most changes were wrong-to-right. We conclude that reconsideration of test items is probably underestimated in answer-changing studies. The role of memory should be considered in why people change and in how successful they judge their changing to have been.     

The federal government and information technology standards: Building the national information infrastructure

For many years, standards have been important considerations in the Federal government's policies for the use of information technology. The Computer Systems Laboratory (CSL) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology develops and issues technical standards that are used by the Federal government in its information technology systems. The new Federal initiative for the National Information Infrastructure (NII) and the National Performance Review (NPR) make information technology an agent for change and emphasize standards as a means for achieving connectivity of computer and telecommunications technologies and for easy access to information. The Federal government will be challenged to address the technical, organizational, and policy issues that affect the development of the standards needed for future information systems.     

Communication,cognitive processing,and public knowledge about climate change

This study advances the cognitive mediation model (CMM) by examining the factors behind acquiring knowledge about climate change. Based on a nationally representative survey of Singaporeans (N?=?1,083), this study supported the original CMM. The extended CMM showed that surveillance gratification was positively associated with traditional and online media attention, while social utility was positively associated with online media attention. While attentions to traditional and online media were positively associated with elaboration, online media attention was positively associated with selective scanning. Elaboration was positively associated with knowledge. Implications for theory and practice were discussed.     

Early Childhood Education as Development: Critique of the Metaphor

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the recent call for developmentally appropriate practices from the perspective of the sociology of the curriculum. A brief examination of this orientation toward curriculum studies is presented in the first section of this paper. Next, a discussion of curriculum theory as metaphor is presented and used to evaluate early childhood education as development on the basis of ethics, as well as disclosure value. Finally, two alternative metaphors are suggested as possible lenses for viewing the content of the early childhood curriculum: early childhood education as caring and early childhood education as schooling for democracy. Early childhood educators are urged to consider the potential of these two metaphors as ways of orientating discourse about what should be taught in early childhood and primary school classrooms.