“Project Screen” — A Follow‐up Study of a Pre‐school Screening Battery

This study examines a pre‐school screening survey battery with an aim to validate it in terms of predicting school performance. Subjects participating in the screening were tested at the end of their first year at school. Analysis of the data, using a canonical correlation procedure, suggested elimination of a number of test items ‐‐ age, sex, age of walking, socio‐economic rating, Draw‐a‐Man Test, balance and posture, body image, perceptual motor match, height and weight. Measures of general ability, visual discrimination, visual reception, general development, receptive language, language concepts and positional concepts were the best predictors of school performance.     

Progress monitoring with objective measures of writing performance for students with mild disabilities

To adequately monitor progress in writing, a test must show stability and demonstrate a performance profile over time that parallels those of accepted criterion measures. This study investigated the technical adequacy of seven objective indexes of writing quality in monitoring the progress of 36 middle school (Grades 6-8) students with mild disabilities over a 6-month period. The stability of each index was assessed. Holistic ratings of the same writing samples and the Test of Written Language served as validation criteria. Three indexes were moderately correlated with holistic ratings, but were not sufficiently stable over time. Direct, objective writing assessment must be used with caution for progress monitoring, given our present lack of precision in measuring the complex task of writing.     

The rewarding effects of number and surface area of food in rats

Visual cues have an important role in food preference for both rats and humans. Here, we aim to isolate the effects of numerosity, density, and surface area on food preference and running speed in rats, by using a forced-choice maze paradigm. In Experiment 1, rats preferred and ran faster for a group of multiple smaller pellets rather than a single large pellet, corroborating previous research (Capaldi, Miller, & Alptekin Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 15(1), 75–80, 1989). Further experiments tested the prevailing hypothesis that multiple food pieces are more reinforcing because they occupy a larger surface area. Experiment 2 controlled for numerosity by utilizing a continuous food: mashed potatoes flattened to cover a larger surface area or rounded into a ball. The rats preferred and ran faster for the flattened potatoes, suggesting surface area plays a role in quantity estimations. Finally, in Experiment 3, rats displayed no preference or difference in running speed between a group of scattered and clustered pellets when number of pellets were kept constant. Taken together, these results suggest that density has an important role in food perception—that is, the rewarding effect of higher numerosity or larger surface area is removed when the food does not fill out the entire space. Alternative explanations and implications for human diet are discussed.     

A New Approach to Avoiding Problems of Scale in Interpreting Trends in Mental Measurement Data

Extracting policy-relevant information from large national surveys of educational achievement is ordinarily a nontrivial task. It is made more treacherous when the data are expressed on scales that are not uniquely determined. The paper begins with a critical analysis of a recent attempt to interpret the findings on reading achievement obtained by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). It then describes a new approach to the quantification and interpretation of change and demonstrates its appropriateness for repeated cross-sectional designs such as NAEP. Limitations imposed by the survey design and the nature of the measurements are highlighted     

Making values education everyone's business

Adults are typically required to make values‐based decisions multiple times each day.Why, then, should a discussion of values not be explicit across the college curriculum and intentionally integrated into the cocurriculum? The authors describe a place where the work of values education is widely shared.