High-Caste Corinthians: Amateurism and the Bloodstock Industry 1945-75

This contribution considers a variety of aspects of the bloodstock breeding world during the three decades following World War Two, focusing in particular on the breeders of thoroughbred horses and the attitudes of those breeders towards their calling. It is argued that even at this late stage of its history, the persistence of the Corinthian amateur ideal, a dogged indifference to the realities of social and economic change, and a high degree of institutional social exclusiveness was in part responsible for the relative decline of what had been, in the inter-war years, the world's pre-eminent bloodstock industry.     

T & T is an Explosive Combination: Technology and Testing

In this article, I discuss the effect technology has had on the development of intelligence testing. I propose three fundamental principles of technology. First: Old technologies do not die; they just fade away. Sometimes they are like age spots, which fade away ever so slowly, if at all. Second: Successful technologies multiply like rabbits. And like rabbits, when they have multiplied extensively, they will start to invade areas where they are unnecessary, and even useless. Third: Successful technologies are originally driven by ideas. Once the technologies succeed, however, they start driving ideas, instead of being driven by them. After discussing these principles, I describe the specifications for the Sternberg Triarchic Abilities Test (STAT), a new test that is theory driven rather than technology driven.     

Cultural concepts of giftedness

Different cultures have different conceptions of what it means to be gifted. But in identifying children as gifted, we often use only our own conception, ignoring the cultural context in which the children grew up. Such identification is inadequate and fails to do justice to the richness of the world's cultures. It also misses children who are gifted and may identify as gifted children those who are not.     

Should you show me the money? Concrete objects both hurt and help performance on mathematics problems

How do concrete objects that cue real-world knowledge affect students' performance on mathematics word problems? In Experiment 1, fourth- and sixth-grade students (N = 229) solved word problems involving money. Students in the experimental condition were given bills and coins to help them solve the problems, and students in the control condition were not. Students in the experimental condition solved fewer problems correctly. Experiment 2 tested whether this effect was due to the perceptually rich nature of the materials. Fifth-grade students (N = 79) were given: perceptually rich bills and coins, bland bills and coins, or no bills and coins. Students in the perceptually rich condition made the most errors; however, their errors were least likely to be conceptual errors. Results suggest that the use of perceptually rich concrete objects conveys both advantages and disadvantages in children's performance in school mathematics.     

Dynamics of forensic interviews with suspected abuse victims who do not disclose abuse

OBJECTIVES: The present study was designed to explore structural differences between forensic interviews in which children made allegations and those in which children did not make allegations. METHODOLOGY: Fifty forensic interviews of 4- to 13-year-old suspected victims of abuse who did not disclose abuse during the interview were compared with the same number of forensic interviews of alleged victims who made allegations of sexual or physical abuse. Only cases in which there was substantial reason to believe that abuse had taken place were included in the study. Audiotapes of the interviews were examined with a focus on interviewer utterances and children's responses during the pre-substantive rapport-building, episodic memory training, and 'getting the allegation' phases of the interviews, which all employed the NICHD Investigative Interview Guide. FINDINGS: Forensic interviews which yielded allegations of child abuse were characterized by quite different dynamics than interviews with children who did not make allegations. When interviewing non-disclosers, interviewers made less frequent use of free recall prompts and offered fewer supportive comments than when interviewing children who made allegations of abuse. Children who did not disclose abuse were somewhat uncooperative, offered fewer details, and gave more uninformative responses, even at the very beginning of the interview, before the interviewers focused on substantive issues and before the interviewers themselves began to behave differently. CONCLUSIONS: A premature focus on substantive issues may prevent children who are not responsive in the episodic memory training phase from disclosing abuse. Identifying reluctant disclosers and making more extensive efforts to build rapport before substantive issues are broached, or interviewing such children in more than one session, may help suspected victims disclose their experiences.     

Parental Beliefs and Children's School Performance

Immigrant parents from Cambodia, Mexico, the Philippines, and Vietnam and native-born Anglo-American and Mexican-American parents responded to questions about child rearing, what teachers of first and second graders should teach their children, and what characterizes an intelligent child. Immigrant parents rated conforming to external standards as being more important to develop in their children than developing autonomous behaviors. In contrast, American-born parents favored developing autonomy over conformity. Parents from all groups except Anglo-Americans indicated that noncognitive characteristics (i.e., motivation, social skills, and practical school skills) were as important as or more important than cognitive characteristics (i.e., problem-solving skills, verbal ability, creative ability) were to their conceptions of an intelligent first-grade child. Parental beliefs about conformity were correlated with measures of kindergarten (5- and 6-year-olds) and first- (6- and 7-year-olds) and second-grader (7- and 8-year-olds) children's school performance (i.e., teacher ratings of children's classroom performance; Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills reading, math, and language scores; and Sternberg Triarchic Abilities Test scores).     

The effect of being a victim or witness of family violence on the retrieval of autobiographical memories.

OBJECTIVE: This study was designed to determine whether greater reliance on general memory retrieval in children was related to depression, and whether family violence affected the specificity of children's memory retrieval. METHOD: We compared children who had experienced some form of family violence with children who had never experienced any form of family violence, based on their responses to questions concerning child-parent and interparental disagreements. RESULTS: As expected, there was a positive correlation between the extent of "generic-categoric" memory retrieval and depression level. There was no evidence, however, that autobiographical memory was affected by family violence. CONCLUSIONS: This study is the first to report significant associations between depression and autobiographical memory style in children. The results suggest that the effect of family violence on children's memory retrieval may be mediated by depression.     

Investigative interviews of child witnesses in Sweden

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the structure and informativeness of interviews with 4- to 13-year-old alleged victims of sexual abuse in Sweden. METHOD: Seventy-two alleged victims of sexual abuse were interviewed by six experienced officers from one police district in Sweden. Our evaluation focused on the structure of the interviews, the distribution and timing of the investigators' utterance types, and the quantity and quality of the information provided by the children. RESULTS: Content analysis revealed that the interviewers relied primarily on option-posing and suggestive questions--together, these comprised 53% of their utterances--when interviewing the alleged victims. As a result, most of the details (57%) obtained from the children were elicited by option-posing and suggestive utterances. Only 6% of the interviewers' utterances were open-ended invitations, and these elicited only 8% of the information obtained. CONCLUSION: The reliance on option-posing and suggestive prompts may have reduced the accuracy of the information obtained, thereby interfering with the investigations, and reducing the forensic admissibility of the children's statements. This suggests a continuing need in Sweden, as in other countries, for interview practices that enhance the quality of information provided by young victims.     

WICS: A Model of Positive Educational Leadership Comprising Wisdom,Intelligence, and Creativity Synthesized

Who are the people who become positive educational leaders? This essay presents WICS as a model of positive educational leadership. WICS stands for wisdom, intelligence, creativity, synthesized. Each of these elements is asserted to constitute one of the elements of educational leadership. Regrettably, our society is organized around a closed system of selection and talent development that emphasizes intelligence in a narrowly defined way that sometimes ignores its synthesis with creativity and wisdom.