A total of 20 children between seven and 11 years of age and 20 adults categorized rules of perceived high social utility in social conventional terms in both public and private contexts; but they categorized rules of perceived low social utility in social conventional terms in private contexts and in personal terms in public contexts. (RH)

The hypothesis testing abilities of 15 language impaired and 15 normally developing children matched for mental age were investigated using discrimination-learning tasks. Findings indicated the impaired children performed poorer than non-impaired children especially on the nonexplicit problems suggesting the deficits may be related to difficulties…

The logic and procedures underlying a disturbance term regression test of logical consistency for structural models are reviewed for recursive and nonrecursive designs. It is shown that in a simple three-variable, complete mediational case the test procedure is mathematically equivalent to a part correlation. (Author/LMO)

A general procedure is provided for comparing correlation coefficients between optimal linear composites. It allows computationally efficient significance tests on independent or dependent multiple correlations, partial correlations, and canonical correlations, with or without the assumption of multivariate normality. Evidence from Monte Carlo…

When the experimental units are measured twice, and the response variable is dichotomous, the equality of the two proportions is usally assessed by Mc Nemar's (1947) test. In this paper, Bayesian methods are presented for testing hypotheses regarding the two success probabilities in light of complete and incomplete data. (Author/BW)

Responds that hypothesis testing is not a formula for judging debates but an attempt to model the nature of argumentation itself. Addresses criticisms of hypothesis testing and the role of paradigms in argumentation theory and practice. (PD)

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…