Vocational education researchers have relied heavily on opinionnaires to measure opinions and attitudes. Usually respondents are asked to indicate their degree of agreement to an attitude or opinion statement. Where significant statistical differences exist for opinions/attitudes there is still always the problem of confidence with which…

Identifies three sources of reporting deficiency for meta-analytic results: quality (adequacy) of publicizing; quality of macrolevel reporting, and quality of microlevel reporting. Reanalysis of 25 reports from the Smith, Glass and Miller (1980) psychotherapy meta-analysis established two sources of misinformation, interrater reliabilities and…

Confidence intervals (CIs) for means are frequently advocated as alternatives to null hypothesis significance testing (NHST), for which a common theme in the debate is that conclusions from CIs and NHST should be mutually consistent. The authors examined a class of CIs for which the conclusions are said to be inconsistent with NHST in…

Butterfield found that internal Ss tended to make more constructive responses to frustration-type situations than did extrenal Ss. Therefore, this study predicted that internal Ss would rate themselves as more confident with regard to problem-solving abilities than would external Ss. (Author)

Wider use in psychology of confidence intervals (CIs), especially as error bars in figures, is a desirable development. However, psychologists seldom use CIs and may not understand them well. The authors discuss the interpretation of figures with error bars and analyze the relationship between CIs and statistical significance testing. They propose…

Discusses and applies to data models of juror decision making that make explicit what has been implicit in most previous theorizing about jury behavior--namely, a decision criterion and a distribution of apparent weight of evidence. (Author/RK)

Through utilization of effective sampling procedures, libraries may obtain substantial savings in terms of data collection costs. A theoretical statistical sampling model is presented and two types of random sampling techniques are empirically compared as to their effectiveness in estimating a library usage parameter. Implications are drawn for…

Describes a computer-based method of confidence-testing, available in batch processing and interactive form, which improves a student's ability to assess probabilities during clinical diagnosis. The methods and results of three experiments are presented. (EAO)

A study designed to determine the extent of improvement in performance as a result of a structured experiential learning situation assessed particular techniques for reinforcing learning in a personnel administration class. Confidence in knowledge scores increased from pretest to posttest for most students, but only some knowledge scores…

Although gender differences are fairly consistent when men and women report their general confidence, much less is known about the existence of such differences when subjects are asked to assess the degree of confidence they have in their ability to answer any particular test or exam question. The objective of this research was to investigate…

Two studies investigated robustness of the effect of precise elaborations on memory and relationship of these effects to metacognitions about learning. Sentences which were elaborated in different ways were read to subjects by experimenters to establish levels of meaningfulness and identify effects on performance. Comprehension and confidence…