A metacritical judging model for contest oral interpretation that evaluates the performer's critical decisions is designed to meet three criteria: (1) it attempts to incorporate the advances of oral interpretation scholars outside the forensics community with the activity at forensics tournaments, (2) it recognizes that forensics competition is…

Given the concern for reliability in essay evaluation and the prospect of "error" variance in its absence, methods to promote interrater reliability in the evaluation of written compositions have been developed. These methods reduce variation in the value systems being applied by readers to texts, either by limiting the group of readers…

Prestige-suggestion, the effect that the prestige or reputation of a source has on a receiver, is the subject of this paper. Three research studies which have been done recently by researchers in reading are reported. These studies asked the following questions: If consumers evaluate products by means of reading store advertisements, will they be…

Reports on a study of people's decision making with respect to quality and authority on the World Wide Web. Seven facets of judgment of information quality were identified: source, content, format, presentation, currency, accuracy, and speed of loading. Institutional and individual authority was identified as an underlying theme in source…

Probabilistic reasoning as developed by John Locke can provide the English teacher with a useful system for teaching the research paper since it consists of four major strategies for probing a subject: (1) the use of maxims or principles, (2) the framing of hypotheses, (3) the use of analogy, and (4) the reliance on authority. However, it is the…

Recently, an emphasis has been placed on the new paradigm of teacher reflection as an expression of what should be developed in teacher education programs. A discussion is presented on this term as it relates to the "teacher as a reflective decision-maker" model for clinical instruction and teacher evaluation occuring within such…

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…

A number of laboratory studies have addressed the question of how people integrate different pieces of information to form an overall evaluative judgment. Models of information integration, i.e., the adding model and the averaging model, were tested by gathering questionnaire data from 233 respondents in 17 groups who were expected to vary in…

Many researchers have begun to investigate juvenile justice as a series of interdependent treatment and punishment decisions made by different professionals. To test the effects of resource availability and agency type on judgments of amenability to treatment, court personnel (N=49), social service workers (N=66), and community mental health…

Debate paradigms, which at one time established standards to help judges evaluate arguments and rules to guide debaters' argument choice and strategy selection, no longer offer consistent guidance for either judges or debaters. An increased emphasis on creativity and flexibility has led to a general unwillingness to use a rigid debate format. The…

A study examined the effect of attitude toward capital punishment on the evaluation of evidence and the determination of guilt. Subjects were 224 undergraduate students who read a description of a murder. They then received two, four, or six items of evidence relevant to the defendant's guilt. Subjects were asked to determine a verdict and…

This paper discusses evaluation design considerations for a computer based evaluation simulation developed at the University of Iowa College of Medicine in Cardiology to assess the diagnostic skills of primary care physicians and medical students. The simulation developed allows for the assessment of diagnostic skills of physicians in the…

Comparison processes play an important role in any kind of judgment, including judgments about one's well-being. To find out how information about one's own life influences judgments of well-being, two experiments were conducted with a sample of 52 students. It was hypothesized that spatial, temporal, and social distance would influence judgments.…

Schemata is one example of a cognitive construct used extensively by social and personality psychologists to explain some of the biases that emerge when people process information about themselves and others. Recently gender has also been seen as a cognitive schema. Sex and gender schema processing were examined in 40 male and 40 female college…

Evaluators of argument are frequently confronted by conflicting claims. While these claims are usually based on probabilities, they are often resolved with the accepted claim treated as though it were "true," while the rejected claim is treated as though it were "false." Scenario testing is the label applied to a set of…