A study reveals the need for extensive refinement of the Revised Perceived Environmental Control Measure purported in the past to be a reliable and valid instrument to measure the relationship between the psychological construct, "locus of control," and environmental action or environmentally responsible behavior. (MCO)

Individuals (n=45) with mild, moderate, or no mental retardation were provided brief descriptions of medical, behavioral, and pharmacologic treatments requiring informed consent. Interviews with the subjects provided reliable determinations about capability, with high levels of interrater agreement. The likelihood of being determined capable to…

Two studies are reported that measure the long-term stability of performance assessments involving story-writing and poetry-writing (involving grade four and five students) and story-telling (involving grade two students). The long-term stability of these assessments compares favorably with stability figures for other creativity tests. (Author/JDD)

This study, involving 24 children or adolescents with pervasive developmental disorders, assessed 3 autism scales: Autism Behavior Checklist, Real Life Rating Scale, and Childhood Autism Rating Scale. The study analyzed interrater reliability, correlations between pairs of the three scales, diagnostic classification cutoff scores, and…

The Assessment of Preterm Infants' Behavior (APIB) is a newborn neurobehavioral assessment appropriate for preterm, at risk, and full-term newborns, from birth to 1 month after expected due date. The APIB is based in ethological--evolutionary thought and focuses on the assessment of mutually interacting behavioral subsystems in simultaneous…

Research on the utility of feedback to raters in the form of performance reports has produced mixed findings (Lunt, Morton, & Wigglesworth, 1994; Wigglesworth, 1993) and has thus far been trialled only in oral assessment contexts. This article reports on a study investigating raters' attitudes and responsiveness to feedback on their ratings of…

A behavioral assessment system for scoring the behaviors of parents and coaches at youth sports games is described within this paper. The Youth Sports Behavior Assessment System (YSBAS) contains nine behavioral categories describing behaviors commonly seen during youth sports. The developmental process of YSBAS and the observer-training program…

In educational research, characteristics of the learning environment are generally assessed by asking students to evaluate features of their lessons. The student ratings produced by this simple and efficient research strategy can be analysed from two different perspectives. At the "individual level", they represent the individual student's…

Practicing clinicians frequently offer judgments about aspects of swallowing physiology rather than performing actual measurements. Little is known about the accuracy of those judgments. The purpose of this preliminary study was to explore agreement of clinicians' judgments of pharyngeal swallow response time (PSRT) with temporal measurements of…

Validity is a critically important issue with far-reaching implications for testing. The history of conceptualizations of validity over the past 50 years is reviewed, and 3 important areas of controversy are examined. First, the question of whether the three traditionally recognized types of validity should be integrated as a unitary entity of…

The program evaluation standards approved by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) in 1994 that deal with reliability and validity accurately represent contemporary views of the psychometric community with regard to reliability and validity. As such, these standards move the field forward. The ANSI standards recognize that reliability…

This practicum report was designed to enhance supervision of social work through the development and utilization of a resource directory. A pilot agency, located in an ethnically diverse, metropolitan community, was provided the directory in an attempt to positively influence the implementation of the supervision recommendations. The agency then…

The correlation coefficient is an integral part of many other statistical techniques (analysis of variance, t-tests, etc.), since all analytic methods are actually correlational (G. V. Glass and K. D. Hopkins, 1984). The correlation coefficient is a statistical summary that represents the degree and direction of relationship between two variables.…

Cross-validation, an economical method for assessing whether sample results will generalize, is discussed in this paper. Cross-validation is an invariance technique that uses two subsets of the data sample to derive discriminant function coefficients. The two sets of coefficients are then used with each data subset to derive discriminant function…

Author explained what the quotient in IQ stands for, whether the IQ changes, how to relate IQ to other factors, and its future in measuring human intelligence and personality development. (RK)