Using Design-Based Latent Growth Curve Modeling With Cluster-Level Predictor to Address Dependency

The authors compared the effects of using the true Multilevel Latent Growth Curve Model (MLGCM) with single-level regular and design-based Latent Growth Curve Models (LGCM) with or without the higher-level predictor on various criterion variables for multilevel longitudinal data. They found that random effect estimates were biased when the higher-level predictor was not included and that standard errors of the regression coefficients from the higher-level were underestimated when a regular LGCM was used. Nevertheless, random effect estimates, regression coefficients, and standard error estimates were consistent with those from the true MLGCM when the design-based LGCM included the higher-level predictor. They discussed implication for the study with empirical data illustration.     

Development of a Curriculum for Long-Term Care Nurses to Improve Recognition of Depression in Dementia

There is increasing recognition of the severe consequences of depression in long-term care residents with dementia. Most health care providers are unprepared to recognize and to manage the complexity of depression in dementia. Targeted educational initiatives in nursing homes are needed to address this growing problem. This paper describes the development of competencies, learning objectives, and learning outcomes for a curriculum on depression in dementia for nurses working in nursing home settings. This work provides the foundation for a curriculum to improve learning for nurses and, ultimately, to advance health care outcomes for residents with cooccurring depression and dementia.     

New books

LANGUAGE ‐ MAN ‐ SOCIETY: READINGS IN COMMUNICATION. Ed. Harold E. Briggs. New York: Rinehart and Co., 1949; pp. xv + 707. $3.50.

THE ART OF FORCEFUL SPEAKING. By Richard C. Reager. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1949; pp. xvi + 302. $1.49.

HOW TO PUT YOUR IDEAS ACROSS. By Richard W. Wetherill. New York: D. Van Nostrand Company, 1949; pp. x + 435. $2.75.

PUBLIC SPEAKING WITHOUT FEAR AND TREMBLING. By Mark Hanna. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1949; pp. 166. $2.75.

BASIC PUBLIC SPEAKING. By Paul L. Soper. New York: Oxford University Press, 1949; pp. xxi + 394. $2.50.

HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC SPEAKING. Revised Edition. By A. R. Thompr son. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949; pp. xix + 177. $1.50.

BASIC TRAINING IN SPEECH. Brief Edition. By Lester Thonssen and Howard Gilkinson. Boston: D. C. Heath and Co., 1949; pp. 249. $2.25

HOW TO TALK MORE EFFECTIVELY. By Jean Bordeaux and T. W. Tanaka. Chicago: American Technical Society, 1949; pp. x + 218. $2.75.

DEMOCRACY THROUGH DISCUSSION. By Bruno Lasker. New York: The W. H. Wilson Co., 1949; pp. xvii + 376. $3.50.

THE HUMAN NATURE OF PLAYWRITING. By Samson Raphaelson. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1949; pp. viii + 267. $4.00.

PLAY PRODUCTION AND DIRECTION. By C. Lowell Lees. New York: Prentice‐Hall, 1948; pp. xiii + 311. $5.00.

HOW TO SPEAK THE WRITTEN WORD. By Nedra Newkirk Lamar. New York: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1949; pp. 175. $2.50.

THE ART OF GOOD SPEECH. By Dwight Bolinger and Ralph Weiman. 4 v. Philadelphia: Russell Press, 1948; pp. 159. $9.50.

GENERAL SPEECH: AN INTRODUCTION. By A. Craig Baird and Franklin H. Knower. New York: McGraw‐Hill Book Co., 1949; pp. ix + 500. $3.50.

PUBLIC SPEAKING FOR BUSINESS. By William G. Hoffman. Third Edition, Revised and Enlarged. New York: McGraw‐Hill Book Co., 1949; pp. xiii + 412. $3.50.

THE LANGUAGE OF WISDOM AND FOLLY: BACKGROUND HEADINGS IN SEMANTICS. Ed. Irving J. Lee. New York; Harper and Brothers, 1949; pp. xxii + 361. $3.00.     

The Effects of Motivational Instruction on College Students' Performance on Low-Stakes Assessment

Assessments of student learning outcomes (SLO) have been widely used in higher education for accreditation, accountability, and strategic planning purposes. Although important to institutions, the assessment results typically bear no consequence for individual students. It is important to clarify the relationship between motivation and test performance and identify practical strategies to boost students' motivation in test taking. This study designed an experiment to examine the effectiveness of a motivational instruction. The instruction increased examinees' self-reported test-taking motivation by .89 standard deviations (SDs) and test scores by .63 SDs. Students receiving the instruction spent an average of 14 more seconds on an item than students in the control group. Score difference between experimental and control groups narrowed to .23 SDs after unmotivated students identified by low response time were removed from the analyses. The findings provide important implications for higher education institutions which administer SLO assessments in a low-stakes setting.     

Broadcast Journalism

Thomas R. Asher and J. Victor Hahn's Broadcast Media Guide for Candidates (Washington: Media Access Project, 1910 N Street N.W., 1974—price not given, but about $3.00, paper).

Bruce Herschensohn's The Gods of Antenna (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1975—$7.95)

Robert M. Batscha's Foreign Affairs News and the Broadcast Journalist (New York: Praeger Special Studies, 1975-$15.00)

Stanley Field's The Mini-Documentary: Serializing TV News (Blue Ridge Summit, Pa.: Tab Books, 1975—$12.95)

Walter Winchell's Winchell Exclusive (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975—$8.95)     

Telecommunications

R. Terry Ellmore The Illustrated Dictionary of Broadcast-CATV-Telecommunications (Blue Ridge Summit, Pa.: TAB Books, 1977—$14.95)

first is Edward L. Safford CBer's Handy Manual of SSB (Blue Ridge Summit, Pa.: TAB Books, 1977—$2.25, paper)

Victor F.G. Veley Third Class FCC License Study Guide (Blue Ridge Summit, Pa.: TAB Books, 1977—$9.95/6.95)

Communication by Satellite: Perspectives for Users (Institut International de la Communication, 3535 Chemin de la Reine-Marie, bureau 218, Montreal H3V 1H8, Quebec, Canada—$12.00, paper).

Paul Polishuk and Michael O'Bryant, Exposition Proceedings: Telecommunications and Economic Development (Horizon House, 610 Washington St., Dedham, Mass. 02026—$100 for the set of two volumes, paper).     

Using profile expansion techniques to alleviate the new user problem

Collaborative Filtering techniques have become very popular in the last years as an effective method to provide personalized recommendations. They generally obtain much better accuracy than other techniques such as content-based filtering, because they are based on the opinions of users with tastes or interests similar to the user they are recommending to. However, this is precisely the reason of one of its main limitations: the cold-start problem. That is, how to recommend new items, not yet rated, or how to offer good recommendations to users they have not information about. For example, because they have recently joined the system. In fact, the new user problem is particularly serious, because an unsatisfied user may stop using the system before it could even collect enough information to generate good recommendations. In this article we tackle this problem with a novel approach called “profile expansion”, based on the query expansion techniques used in Information Retrieval. In particular, we propose and evaluate three kinds of techniques: item-global, item-local and user-local. The experiments we have performed show that both item-global and user-local offer outstanding improvements in precision, up to 100%. Moreover, the improvements are statistically significant and consistent among different movie recommendation datasets and several training conditions.