This study compared responses to three vignettes describing incidents between a male patient and a female nurse that involved the nurse being mildly assaulted, severely assaulted, or verbally abused (the control condition) by the patient. After reading each vignette, 32 of 42 female senior-year nursing students and 28 of 48 practicing nurses…

An approach to detecting differential item functioning using the Rasch model with equivalent-group cross-validation was investigated. College students taking the Dental Admission Test, were divided by gender (936 females and 1,537 males) into 2 different samples. Rasch analyses were performed on both samples. Data were recalibrated after…

This journal issue discusses student attrition and the major recurring themes regarding students withdrawing from college. It is revealed that less than 15 percent of student departures are as a result of academic dismissal, with the remaining students leaving voluntarily, even when their academic performance is clearly acceptable. The following…

Fifteen college classes were identified via standardized student ratings as having had superior testing procedures. Instructors in those classes were asked to describe their evaluation procedures, and interviews were conducted with 27 students randomly selected from the classes. Interviewed students stressed the "communicative" dimension…

Since student ratings of teacher effectiveness are instrumental in faculty promotion and tenure decisions, the assets and limitations of such ratings must be understood. To investigate the impact of three personality factors (ability, locus of control, and self-esteem) and academic performance on expectation and attributions of performance, 212…

The ability of Vroom's expectancy motivation theory to predict student satisfaction with the college environment, student participation at school, and student academic performance was studied. Specific objectives of the study were as follows: to test the ability of Vroom's valence model to predict student satisfaction, to test the ability of…

Previous research suggests that observers of spouse abuse are likely to arrive at overly dispositional causal explanations for the abusive behavior, and reject both the abusing spouse and his victim. As part of a study examining observers' perceptions of a spouse abuse incident under varying conditions, 160 college students read a vignette about…

Leadership education is offered in a variety of options at numerous colleges and universities: freestanding courses, seminars or within a program, case studies, online instruction, and umbrella leadership courses within various majors. This paper is about the Leadership Program at the City University of New York (CUNY). The Institute for Virtual…

The protagonist of Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "Young Goodman Brown" misinterprets experiences that befall him because he cannot escape what Jean Piaget calls "egocentrism"--lack of awareness of anything outside one's immediate experience. Today's college students, reading Hawthorne, misinterpret the story, since they too…

Three basic beliefs support teaching: (1) learning is social and individual; (2) learning must be personally meaningful; (3) learning rests upon a knowledge base that is constructed, not transmitted. The first step to creating an environment which supports learning in meaningful ways is for the teacher and students to become better inquirers into…

To discover what part parent impartiality might play in creating a climate in which each individual child can prosper, 198 college students from a large Midwestern urban university were questioned about their perceptions of their parents' behavior during the time that they were growing up. The first section of the survey consisted of 50 questions…

Forty-eight college students participated in a study that (1) explored the degree to which the reader response technique developed by W. F. Brewer and E. H. Lichtenstein to study artificial texts could be applied to natural texts, and (2) compared texts written over a wide time period and from two different literary traditions (six American and…

This study was designed to determine the relationship between the Lowenfeldian visual-haptic (perceptual) and the Piagetian concrete-formal (operational reasoning) continua. The study also investigated the relationship between age, sex, academic goal, academic preference, and a person's perceptual aptitude or intellectual reasoning abilities.…

Research has found that, in many performance situations, attributions of success and failure may reflect numerous experiences occurring over time. To expand this research, achievement attributions in an extended ego-involving situation, i.e., performance in an academic course, were examined. In addition to the traditional causes of effort,…

The research presented in this document has two main hypotheses: (1) From locus of control theory, it was predicted that a warm, supportive, and consistent or stable home environment relates positively to internal control; (2) Methods derived from locus of control theory which increase an individual's observation and experience of behavior-effect…