Factors affecting adoption of instructional innovations: An example from medical education

This study sets forth an eight-variable causal model describing the spread of instructional innovations among individual faculty members. The model is tested by examining the diffusion of a particular innovation—self-instructional materials—among the faculty of sixteen medical schools, with data provided by faculty survey. The causal model as initially posited is found not to fit the data well; modifications of the model are found to conform more closely. The primary measure accounting for observed variance in faculty innovation behavior is frequency of communication with colleagues about the instructional process.     

Fitting the Message to the Listener: Children Selectively Mention General and Specific Facts

In three experiments, two hundred and ninety‐seven 4‐ to 6‐year‐olds were asked to describe objects to a listener, and their answers were coded for the presence of general and specific facts. In Experiments 1 and 2, the listener's knowledge of the kinds of objects was manipulated. This affected references to specific facts at all ages, but only affected references to general facts in children aged 5 and older. In Experiment 3, children's goal in communicating was either pedagogical or not. Pedagogy influenced references to general information from age 4, but not references to specific information. These findings are informative about how children vary general and specific information in conversation, and suggest that listeners' knowledge and children's pedagogical goals influenced children's responses via different mechanisms.     

Children's emotions and behaviors in response to infants' cries

Infant crying can elicit in others both a range of emotions and contrasting behavioral reactions, such as altruistic caregiving versus aggression. Variations in reactions to young infants' cries were examined in 60 children ranging in age from late preschool to preadolescence. Each child over-heard either a preterm or a full-term tape-recorded cry from an adjacent room. Then a mother, carrying her infant, came looking for her (previously) "crying" infant's bottle. Later each child was interviewed after hearing a tape recording of a preterm and a full-term cry. Children's emotions and behaviors thus were assessed in response to simulated, real distresses and hypothetical representations of distress. Children's self-reports of empathy, their verbalized intentions to help, their actual helping responses, and observers' ratings of negative emotion were common responses to cries at all ages. In addition there were significant increases with age in prosocial, behavioral interventions. Expressions of negative emotion were inversely related to subsequent forms of prosocial behavior that required direct interaction with the infant. The emotions and behaviors of most children were not influenced by whether they heard preterm or full-term cries. They were, however, able to discriminate between such cries and some articulated "theories" about the impact of the cries on the listener.     

Test Standards—Some Implications for the Measurement Curriculum

This paper demonstrates how an analysis of the Test Standards can be used to define the body of knowledge needed by teachers for the effective use of tests in classroom instruction. This knowledge domain is essential for describing a sound measurement curriculum for preservice teachers and for outlining specifications for teacher certification testing-. Procedures are described for identifying standards relevant to teachers' classroom role functions and for describing the behavior inherent in those standards.     

Optimal Controls that Maximize the Expectation of First Passage Time

This paper deals with optimal controls that maximize the expectation of first passage time of the state, of a stochastic non-linear system, to the complement of an open and bounded domain. The performance index includes a penalty on the magnitude of the deviation of the first passage time from its expectation. The nonlinear system considered here is subjected to two different kinds of perturbations. The first kind of perturbation is represented by a vector of independent standard Wiener processes and the second kind by a vector of a generalized type of Poisson process.By using a variational approach, necessary conditions on the optimal controls are derived. These conditions are given by a set of four coupled nonlinear partial integro- differential equations. A nonlinear stochastic third-order system is given as a test case, and a numerical method for the computation of its optimal controls, is suggested. The efficiency and applicability of this method are demonstrated with examples.