Government secrecy: policy depths and dimensions

Government secrecy has a long history in the American federal experience. Several kinds of government secrecy policy are reviewed here, beginning with their origins, or “policy depths,” and extending to their most recent expressions or “dimensions.” It is a rich history which, in this brief overview, is explored only in terms of its highlights, but offers, nonetheless, a roadmap for pursuing research in this area. It concludes with the observation that, in a democracy, representatives of the citizenry, whether elected or appointed, may momentarily cloak their decisionmaking and their policies in secrecy for the good of the nation—to protect it from enemies and to assure its survival. Those representatives must remember that the secrecy they impose is only momentary and that the shrouded decisions and policies they make, once made known to the citizenry, must be acceptable to them. The citizenry, in turn, accept such secrecy only in limited instances and on a momentary basis in order to have the confidence that their representatives are making decisions and policies acceptable to them. A government failing to honor these arrangements may well be regarded as one “not worth the cost of preservation.”     

Bringing evidence to practice: a team approach to teaching skills required for an informationist role in evidence-based clinical and public health practice

Objective: The objectives were (1) to develop an academic, graduate-level course designed for information professionals seeking to bring evidence to clinical medicine and public health practice and to address, in the course approach, the “real-world” time constraints of these domains and (2) to further specify and realize identified elements of the “informationist” concept.Setting: The course took place at the Division of Health Sciences Informatics, School of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University.Participants: A multidisciplinary faculty, selected for their expertise in the course core competencies, and three students, two post-graduate National Library of Medicine (NLM) informationist fellows and one NLM second-year associate, participated in the research.Intervention: A 1.5-credit, graduate-level course, “Informationist Seminar: Bringing the Evidence to Practice,” was offered in October to December 2006. In this team-taught course, a series of lectures by course faculty and panel discussions involving outside experts were combined with in-class discussion, homework exercises, and a major project that involved choosing and answering, in both oral and written form, a real-world question based on a case scenario in clinical or public health practice.Conclusion: This course represents an approach that could be replicated in other academic health centers with similar pools of expertise. Ongoing journal clubs that reiterate the question-and-answer process with new questions derived from clinical and public health practice and incorporate peer review and faculty mentoring would reinforce the skills acquired in the seminar.

Highlights

• Interdisciplinary faculty designed and offered a graduate-level course to teach the skills required by an informationist in clinical and public health practice, further elaborating a model for preparing informationists.

Implications

• This scalable approach to teaching skills for the transfer of evidence into practice could be replicated in academic health centers with similar pools of expertise; such replication could contribute data toward validating this training approach.
• Greater clarity on an appropriate, or “good enough,” standard of evidence for supporting point-of-action decision making is needed.
• Based on the assumption that practicing skills increases confidence and the likelihood that skills will be applied, this course included mentored practice of oral and written evidence presentation skills. Further research could determine whether a course that includes such mentored practice increases the likelihood that students will apply their newly acquired skills.

     

Processing errors in conditional and biconditional problem solving behavior

Students (N = 237) in each of grades 8, 10, 12, and 14 were randomly divided into three groups and administered either a 16-item multiple-choice test of conditional syllogisms, or a 16-item test of biconditional syllogisms, or a 32-item test with both conditional and biconditional syllogisms. Results provided within experiment and within-subjects comparison of responses on conditional and biconditional syllogisms. A comparison of response patterns on conditional items with responses on actual biconditional items provided a direct test of the previously hypothesized biconditional misinterpretation of conditional problems. These analyses confirmed the strong tendency of subjects (across grades) to interpret conditional syllogisms biconditionally. Surprisingly, performance on biconditional problems does not improve systematically with age; in fact, college sophomores perform only slightly better than eighth graders. With regard to conditional syllogisms, results confirmed previously described performance variations across forms of both major and second premises and also replicated an unusual reversed developmental trend on the problem which involves denying the consequent.     

Identifying Promising Items: The Use of Crowdsourcing in the Development of Assessment Instruments

The psychometrically sound development of assessment instruments requires pilot testing of candidate items as a first step in gauging their quality, typically a time-consuming and costly effort. Crowdsourcing offers the opportunity for gathering data much more quickly and inexpensively than from most targeted populations. In a simulation of a pilot testing protocol, item parameters for 110 life science questions are estimated from 4,043 crowdsourced adult subjects and then compared with those from 20,937 middle school science students. In terms of item discrimination classification (high vs. low), classical test theory yields an acceptable level of agreement (C-statistic = 0.755); item response theory produces excellent results (C-statistic = 0.848). Item response theory also identifies potential anchor items without including any false positives (items with low discrimination in the targeted population). We conclude that the use of crowdsourcing subjects is a reasonable, efficient method for the identification of high-quality items for field testing and for the selection of anchor items to be used for test equating.     

Counselor Education Program Development: A Communication-Information Model

The common core concept was presented as the vehicle for developing a more adaptive educational program for the counseling profession. The communication model developed was based on the assumption of common elements of role behavior for counselors across agency settings. The model also depends upon the explication of communication and information needs necessary for adequate functioning of the counselor across as well as within settings as the basis for curriculum content. An organizational structure for implementing the communication model was explicated in a training program setting to facilitate the implementation of the model.