The Model American Foundation Officer: Alan Gregg and the Rockefeller Foundation Medical Divisions

From 1919 to 1951, Alan Gregg and his mentor, Richard Pearce, directed the Medical Education and Medical SciencesDivisions of the Rockefeller Foundation. Although they oversaw the expenditure of millions of dollars, today they are forgotten. Yet, the system that Gregg administered became the model for the funding of biomedical research after the Second World War. This paper draws on the records of the Rockefeller Foundation to assess Gregg and his impact on biomedicine and philanthropy.     

Patterns of Instructional-design Factors Prompting Reflective Thinking in Middle-school and College Level Problem-based Learning Environments

Reflective-thinking skills are important in problem-based learning environments as they help learners become deeply engaged in learning. The literature suggests several instructional-design factors (e.g., environment, teaching methods, scaffolding tools) that may prompt reflection in learners. However, it is unclear whether these factors differ based on age or developmental stage. The results of this study indicate that middle-school students perceive the learning environment factor as more important to prompting their thinking, while college students perceive the scaffolding methods factor as more important. While the elements clustered into two factors, most college students disagreed with their helpfulness in prompting reflective thinking, a finding opposite to that obtained for middle-school students. Different patterns were also found between learners’ perceptions of the most helpful elements within each factor. Based on these results, suggestions are given for designing developmentally and age-appropriate PBL learning environments that support reflective thinking.     

Landmark use by squirrel monkeys (Saimiri sciureus)

Two squirrel monkeys searched for a reward buried in 1 of 144 holes that formed a 12×12 grid (48×50 cm). An array of vertical, colored landmarks was placed on the grid, and their locations on the grid were changed from trial to trial. During training trials, the mealworm reward was placed either in the center of a square array of landmarks (Experiments 1 and 3) or midway between two landmarks (Experiment 2). On nonrewarded test trials, the monkeys searched among landmarks placed in the same arrays as those used in training and among landmarks placed in an expanded array (Experiments 1 and 2) or in an array intermediate between the two arrays used in training (Experiment 3). Distributions of searches on test trials indicated that the monkeys searched mostly within the configuration of the landmarks but that they had not coded the location of the reward as being either in the middle of the landmarks or at a fixed distance and direction from an individual landmark.     

Photography

Alexander Gardner, Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War (original edition 1866, reissued in 1959, $4.50, 224 pp.)

Ray Meredith, Mr. Lincoln's Cameraman: Mathew B. Brady (original edition 1946, reissued in slightly revised form in 1974, $6.95, 368 pp.)

Mary Black, Old New York in Early Photographs: 1853-1901 (new publication in 1973 (not a reprint), $6.00, 228 pp.)

Berenice Abbott, New York in the Thirties (original edition 1939, reissued 1973, $3.50, 100 pp.)

William Welling's Collector's Guide to Nineteenth Century Photographs (New York: Macmillan, 1976---$15.95/7.95)

Weston J. Naef and James N. Wood's Era of Exploration: The Rise of Landscape Photography in the American West: 1860---1885 (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1975---S25.00)

James L. Lager's Leica Illustrated Guide: 1925-1975 (Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.: Morgan and Morgan, Inc., 1975---$7.95, paper)

Mark Jacobs and Ken Kokrda's Photography in Focus (Skokie, Ill.: National Textbook Co., 1975---price not given, paper; with a "Curriculum Guide for Photography" instructor's manual available as well)

Claus-Peter Sdhmid's Photography for Artists and Craftsmen (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1975---$9.95)     

Multiple‐Choice Tests and Student Understanding: What Is the Connection?

Instructors can use both “multiple‐choice” (MC) and “constructed response” (CR) questions (such as short answer, essay, or problem‐solving questions) to evaluate student understanding of course materials and principles. This article begins by discussing the advantages and concerns of using these alternate test formats and reviews the studies conducted to test the hypothesis (or perhaps better described as the hope) that MC tests, by themselves, perform an adequate job of evaluating student understanding of course materials. Despite research from educational psychology demonstrating the potential for MC tests to measure the same levels of student mastery as CR tests, recent studies in specific educational domains find imperfect relationships between these two performance measures. We suggest that a significant confound in prior experiments has been the treatment of MC questions as homogeneous entities when in fact MC questions may test widely varying levels of student understanding. The primary contribution of the article is a modified research model for CR/MC research based on knowledge‐level analyses of MC test banks and CR question sets from basic computer language programming. The analyses are based on an operationalization of Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning Goals for the domain, which is used to develop a skills‐focused taxonomy of MC questions. However, we propose that their analyses readily generalize to similar teaching domains of interest to decision sciences educators such as modeling and simulation programming.     

Separating the Odds: Thresholds for Entropy in Logistic Regression

Abstract

Researchers are often reluctant to rely on classification rates because a model with favorable classification rates but poor separation may not replicate well. In comparison, entropy captures information about borderline cases unlikely to generalize to the population. In logistic regression, the correctness of predicted group membership is known, however, this information has not yet been utilized in entropy calculations. The purpose of this study was to, 1) introduce three new variants of entropy as approximate-model-fit measures, 2) establish rule-of-thumb thresholds to determine whether a theoretical model fits the data, and 3) investigate empirical Type I error and statistical power associated with those thresholds. Results are presented from two Monte Carlo simulations. Simulation results indicated that EFR-rescaled was the most representative of overall model effect size, whereas EFR provided the most intuitive interpretation for all group size ratios. Empirically-derived thresholds are provided.     

Journalism

George E. Stevens and John B. Webster's Law and the Student Press (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1973---price not given, paper)

Jerome L. Nelson's Libel. A Basic Program for Beginning Journalists (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1973---price not given, paper)

Art of the Printed Book: 1455-1955 (New York: Pierpont Morgan Library, 1973---$20.00/11.00)

Bruce Buschel, Albert Robbins, William Vitta, and Rod Nordland's The Watergate File (New York: Quick Fox Inc., 33 West 60th St., 1973---$3.95, paper)