Concludes that (1) the artificially high standards of hypothesis testing cannot be met by advocates who try to apply the paradigm in debate and (2) the values claimed for hypothesis testing can be achieved in other ways. (PD)

Examination of hypothesis-testing and nonlinguistic symbolic abilities of 10 language impaired and 10 language normal children revealed that language impaired Ss performed significantly more poorly than controls on haptic recognition tasks and on a portion of the discrimination learning task. No differences were found between the groups' concept…

Extending the definitions of part and bipartial correlation to sets of variates, the notion of part and bipartial canonical correlation analysis are developed and illustrated. (Author)

Presents an exposition of two data reduction methods--single-link and complete-link hierarchical clustering. Emphasis is on statistical techniques for evaluating the adequacy of a completed partition hierarchy and the individual partitions within the sequence. A numerical reanalysis of data illustrates the methodology. (RC)

An analysis of variance procedure for testing differences in r-squared, the coefficient of determination, across independent samples is proposed and briefly discussed. The principal advantage of the procedure is to minimize Type I error for follow-up tests of pairwise differences. (Author/JKS)

A communication that contains a particularly strong intent to influence can easily lose persuasive impact or even bring about a "boomerang" effect. Such "boomerang" phenomena have often been attributed to "psychological reactance," a motivational state created when freedoms are threatened or usurped. Two factors that inhibited reactance were…

This paper examines the biophilia hypothesis put forth by E. O. Wilson, which asserts the existence of a fundamental, genetically-based human need and propensity to affiliate with other living organisms and lifelike processes. It reviews research by Wilson and others that supports the biophilia hypothesis, and examines some of the issues and…

This digest complements guidelines addressing the mechanics of online searching by considering how treating information searches as exercises in critical thinking can improve our use of online resources. It addresses the use and application of metacognition, hypothesis testing, and augmentation. Improving metacognition means improving the ability…

D. Robinson and J. Levin (1997) proposed what they called a two-step procedure for analyzing statistical data in which researchers first evaluate the probability of an observed effect statistically (i.e., statistical significance), and, if and only if, it can be concluded that the underlying finding is too improbable to be due to chance, then they…

Research reports published in a science education research journal were examined to calculate the probability of rejecting true null hypotheses. Recommendations for improving analyses and research in science education are provided. (PS)

The G Index is the difference between the frequencies of the homonymly assigned cells and heteronymly assigned cells in a four-fold contingency table. (Author/MB)

A factor rotation scheme is presented which has a property that is interesting for examining factor-structure hypotheses. Given several clusters of tests the orthogonal bounds scheme produces factors which contains these clusters in some optimal sense. (Author)

The influence hypothesis argues that the perceptual superiority of words is due to S's opportunity to use the redundancy in words for making perceptual inferences, while the Unitization hypothesis argues that words are more perceptible because there are fewer units to process in a word than in a nonword. (Author)