Sensitivity to reinforcement contingencies was examined in six individuals with mental retardation using a concurrent operants procedure in the context of a computer game. Results included individual differences in sensitivity and differential sensitivity to rate and magnitude variation. Results suggest that comprehensive assessments of potential…

To see if moderately suicidal outpatients were more accepting of a suicidal person than never- or severely-suicidal outpatients, 105 respondents completed measures of suicidality, depression, acceptance, and empathy. Results indicated, unexpectedly, that net of depression, never-suicidal people were more accepting of a suicidal person than…

This study evaluated an alternative method of identifying early reading difficulty. From a sample of 1st and 2nd grade children, 47 were identified as dually discrepant in reading and compared with 28 children identified as low achieving. Single point measures of fluency and phonological awareness were not sensitive indicators of problems,…

Describes results of study of a 45-item scale developed to measure the construct and administered to four separate samples. The Miville-Guzman Universality-Diversity Scale significantly correlated in theoretically predicted ways with measures of racial identity, empathy, health narcissism, feminism, androgyny, homophobia, and dogmatism (the last…

Argues that the responses to the Oakland, California ebonics resolution miss what made the resolution so significant while also making debate about it so intractable. Proposes that compositionists who acknowledge attitudes that made the resolution so significant can productively engage the larger public regarding literacy education in a racially…

Asserts that because student learning and development are complex and dynamic, educators must learn to differentiate between functional and optimal skill levels and then to target their teaching and curriculum materials accordingly. (PKP)

The goal of this article is to discuss one of Paul Pintrich's more enduring legacies: the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ), an 81-item, self-report instrument consisting of 6 motivation subscales and 9 learning strategies scales. The MSLQ has proven to be a reliable and useful tool that can be adapted for a number of…

This study posits a relationship between Emotional Intelligence (EI) and Impulsive Buying Tendency (IBT). A survey of 574 adolescents found that high-EI adolescents manifested less impulsive behavior than did low-EI adolescents, and high-IBT adolescents were more likely to engage in more impulsive buying behavior than were low-IBT adolescents.…

There is a long line of studies on academic cheating. This literature has established a litany of different individual and contextual factors that seem to inspire student conformity of the official rules of test taking. This study draws on this literature by using fourteen independent variables to explain the cheating habits of students in a…

The authors examined the stability of schizotypal (STPD), borderline (BPD), avoidant (AVPD) and obsessive-compulsive (OCPD) personality disorders (PDs) over 2 years of prospective multiwave follow-up. Six hundred thirty-three participants recruited at 4 collaborating sites who met criteria for 1 or more of the 4 PDs or for major depressive…

Two studies investigated the ability to use contextual information in stories to infer the meanings of novel vocabulary by 9-10-year-olds with good and poor reading comprehension. Across studies, children with poor reading comprehension were impaired when the processing demands of the task were greatest. In Study 2, working memory capacity was…

In this study of the origins of individual differences in theory of mind (ToM), the Environmental Risk (E-Risk) Longitudinal Twin Study sample of 1,116 sixty-month-old twin pairs completed a comprehensive battery of ToM tasks. Individual differences in ToM were striking and strongly associated with verbal ability. Behavioral genetic models of the…

Four hundred eighty six university students completed a confidential questionnaire designed to assess a multitude of aspects of their current and past dating relationships. The 24-item questionnaire was designed to highlight the prevalence and rate that individuals were involved in intercouple relationships; these being interfaith, intercultural,…

Classical factor analysis assumes independent and identically distributed observations. Educational data, however, are often hierarchically structured, with, for example, students being nested within classes. In this study, data on self-esteem gathered in a sample of 1,107 students within 72 school classes in Switzerland were analyzed using…

The present study was conducted to test the ability of two subscales from the Friendship Quality Questionnaire (FQQ; Parker & Asher, 1993) to discriminate between different target friendships. This was done by testing for mean differences between targets, and by using both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses to examine the factor…