Investigated reliability of the Family Narrative Consortium (FNC) scales for measuring the effect of social context on construction of family narratives. Analyzed data from four FNC studies to determine reliability of scale dimensions of narrative coherence, narrative interaction, and relationship beliefs. Found that the scale was a set of…

Examines the effects of text practice and prosodic modeling on the reading rate, accuracy, expressiveness, and comprehension of disabled readers. Each subject read the first half of a set of stories three times under one of four experimental conditions. While reading performance improved across all conditions, substantial additional gains were…

Explores the rationale for college subsidies in most world economies, treating precollege achievement as an insurable risk. Contract theory considers optimum insurance contracts for this risk and views public finance of college education as providing the insurance. The theory yields conditions on optimum taxes and fees. Rationing by…

Describes the statistical test of chi-square analysis. Explains how this test can be used in biology instruction. Examples from blood typing are used. (PR)

Presents one approach to handling the trade-off between reducing uncertainty in environmental assessment and management and additional expenses. Uses the approach in the evaluation of three alternatives for a real time river water quality forecasting system. Analysis of risk attitudes, costs and uncertainty indicated the levels of socioeconomic…

Describes a collaborative writing project in which students must identify key variables, search and read relevant literature, and reason through a research idea by working closely with a partner. The end result is a polished laboratory report in the APA style. The class includes a peer review workshop prior to final editing. (MJP)

Describes a new analytical tool, data envelope analysis (DEA) model, which can provide better understanding of the efficiency of academic research libraries. Reports the results of a study using 1994-1995 Association of Research Libraries statistics together with expert judgments, in terms of constraints, to make the model more applicable to the…

The Wisconsin Emerging Scholars Program (WESP) is a nonremedial, multicultural workshop approach to learning calculus that emphasizes community and collaboration. This approach is designed to foster substantial participation of underrepresented ethnic minority students and alleviate the problems of isolation and lack of support in a large,…

Engineering students were given a mental rotation test at the beginning and end of their first-year engineering course and again several years later to assess the relationship between spatial visualization skill and retention in engineering. No relationship was found between task scores and retention; however, a course in design and graphics…

Compares directors' use of Public Library Data Service statistics and Federal-State Cooperative System for Public Library Data statistics to show how directors make use of statistics and to highlight the statistical information that directors find particularly useful. The survey addressed: last time of use; ways of use; frequency of use of…

Proposes that an important role for connectionist research in language acquisition is analyzing what linguistic information is present in the child's input. Recent connectionist and statistical work analyzing the properties of real language corpora suggest a priori objections against the utility of distributional information are misguided. This…

Describes an exercise for college and high school students that relates descriptive statistics to the regional climatic classification. The exercise introduces students to simple calculations of central tendency and dispersion, the construction and interpretation of scatterplots, and the definition of climatic regions. Forces students to engage…

Presents guidelines for statistics for Web-based information resources developed by the International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC). Outlines use elements that must be provided: number of queries, menu selections, sessions, turn-aways, and items examined. Discusses privacy; user, institutional, and consortial confidentiality;…

Although both low socioeconomic status and cigarette smoking increase health problems and mortality, their possible combined or interactive influence is less clear. On one hand, the health of low status groups may be harmed least by unhealthy behavior such as smoking because, given the substantial health risks produced by limited resources, they…

Introduction: Having a mentor during residency is often linked to greater success in professional development. The present study compares changes in the percentage of residents with mentors in 1999 and in 2004, while considering current residents' perceptions of their mentors, with particular attention focused on what role race and gender might…