Individuals tend to hold on to initial impressions even after the data upon which they have formed the impression have been discredited. To partially replicate and extend a previous study (Ross et al., 1977) on belief perserverance, in which subjects were told they were to act as clinical psychologists attempting to understand and predict…

Teachers should understand how the persuasive process employed by advertisers affects consumers' cognitive responses. They should also be aware of the purposes and techniques employed by the American consumer movement, which is attempting to augment the rights and power of buyers in relation to sellers. Since a review of the current rights of…

Persuasion theories typically attempt to account for attitude change, but mass media reviews influence more ephemeral variables, the chief of which is "interest" in attending or otherwise consuming a cultural event or object. Reviewing and other forms of "evaluative journalism"--including much sports, consumer, and political…

Research in the area of person perception has been dominated by the assumption that people seek stable trait information and view others as highly consistent. To examine whether perceivers would have difficulty in thinking of ways that people have changed, and in reporting instances of such change, 120 college students were asked to complete short…

Designed to help children identify the racial stereotypes that occur in the content and illustrations of some children's books, this lesson plan presents a list of evaluative criteria and applies these standards to two contrasting short stories. The plan concentrates on the child's reaction to character development in both stories and includes…

Sixty-five female undergraduate students who were either standing or reclining listened to a tape-recorded counterattitudinal speech containing either strong or weak arguments. Their evaluations revealed a significant interaction between posture (standing or reclining) and quality of arguments (strong or weak) on a measure of attitude change.…

Two samples, the first consisting of 13 and 16-year-olds and adults, the second consisting of children from kindergarten, second and sixth grades, are interviewed to measure the cognitive processes used to evaluate the credibility of television content. Additional goals include measuring the relationship between the use of these cognitive…

Gender, race, and socioeconomic status are important factors in the experience students have with computers before they reach college classrooms, and these experiences establish the foundation for student and faculty attitudes toward computers. English teachers' attitudes toward computers can be considered in the context of the thinking process…

While it may not be possible to change the content of television, it may be possible to modify its effects on children by making them more critical viewers. The objectives of this project are threefold: to identify processes children use, or can be taught to use, to discriminate the applicability to their own lives of varieties of television…

Student teachers' conceptions of their own successful and unsuccessful lessons were recorded in journals kept during field experience. The student teachers were asked to describe both the most and the least successful lessons taught during the first 2 weeks and again during the final weeks of student teaching. Journals were separated into…