The authors report a meta-analysis of individual differences in detecting deception, confining attention to occasions when people judge strangers' veracity in real-time with no special aids. The authors have developed a statistical technique to correct nominal individual differences for differences introduced by random measurement error. Although…

Beyond reasonable doubt represents a probability value that acts as the criterion for conviction in criminal trials. I introduce the membership function (MF) method as a new tool for measuring quantitative interpretations of reasonable doubt. Experiment 1 demonstrated that three different methods (i.e., direct rating, decision theory based, and…

Administrators at West Virginia University violated procedures and displayed poor judgment in their "seriously flawed" response to an inquiry about a high-profile academic transcript, according to a report issued last week by an independent panel. The harshly worded report found that when the "Pittsburgh Post-Gazette" raised…

The Advanced Placement Program is growing at a striking rate in US high schools and at the same time being abandoned by high-status schools. This paper explores the history of the Advanced Placement Program, from its roots in the 1950s as a programme for challenging high-achieving students at high-status schools, through its equity-motivated…

The authors describe an inquiry-based learning project that required students in a first-year world history course to reflect on and analyze critically the nature of the knowledge found in Wikipedia--the free, open-content, rapidly evolving, internet encyclopedia. Using a rubric, the authors explored students' perceptions of the collaborative and…

In recent decades, the Republic of Turkey has undertaken a program of reform aimed at modernizing its higher education system. This endeavor has included a comprehensive restructuring of the nation's public universities. In order to meet the urgent need for highly qualified faculty members to staff its state-run higher education institutions, the…

In early 2008 the Board of Directors of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) convened a Task Force on Accreditation to work toward a unified approach to accreditation. The Task Force brought together AACTE representatives with the two major federally-recognized accrediting agencies in educator preparation--the…

This article reports that an essay by a film professor at California State University at Long Beach that questions the credentials of his colleagues is stirring controversy on the campus--and sparking investigations. The essay, written by Brian Alan Lane, an associate professor of film, accuses three of his colleagues in the department of film and…

Introduction: We aim to create an in-depth understanding of how pupils in upper secondary school negotiate the credibility and authority of information as part of their practices of learning. Particular focus is on the use of user-created resources, such as "Wikipedia", where authorship is collective and/or hard to determine. Method: An…

To date, few Internet-delivered smoking cessation interventions have been tested. This study tested the efficacy, understandability, credibility and personal relevance of an e-mail-delivered computer-tailored smoking cessation intervention. It included tailored action plan feedback, as recent studies have demonstrated the importance of planning in…

President Obama's education agenda, which unhappily seems to be George W. Bush's program squared, contains two major features that will impact teacher pay and working conditions. The first is that charter schools are to be promoted aggressively. The second is an insistence on teacher merit pay. In this article, the author talks about teacher merit…

This study examined the effects of counselor bilingual ability and counselor ethnicity on client-perceived counselor credibility and cultural competence. Participants were assigned to 1 of 4 treatment conditions created by crossing counselor ethnicity with counselor language. No significant differences were found. Regarding rank ordering of the…

Alternative measures of "confirmation" or "evidential support" have been proposed to express the impact of ascertaining one event on the credibility of another. We report an experiment that compares the adequacy of several such measures as descriptions of confirmation judgment in a probabilistic context.

This article reports a study of one high school senior's process of academic bullshitting as she wrote an analytic essay interpreting Shakespeare's "Much Ado about Nothing." The construct of bullshit has received little scholarly attention; although it is known as a common phenomenon in academic speech and writing, it has rarely been the subject…

Recent research has remarked upon the widespread use of Internet sources by undergraduate students in support of their written ideas. Results of this research indicate there is a tendency for some students to cite sources whose content meets their expedient needs, while ignoring standards of rigor typically required for academic citation. Despite…