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…

Examined whether different lexicalization patterns of motion events in English and Spanish predicted how college student speakers performed in recognition memory and similarity judgment tasks. Found no language effect in recognition memory after either linguistic or non-linguistic encoding, nor in similarity judgments after non-linguistic…

Argues that students should continuously question the purpose of their daily classroom activities and assignments. Explains that when students are required to consider purpose, they begin to develop important intellectual skills, and to bring relevance to their critical thinking and daily life. (NB)

A study examined assessments by 127 preservice teachers, formulated from portfolios of three hypothetical fifth-grade children. Most participants followed a fairly logical set of procedures, formulating criteria to evaluate the assignments and then applying them. A few made decisions not supported by the evidence, commenting on children's quality…

Roles in further education colleges, at various levels of the management structure, are in flux. For the people involved in this process of transformation, the situation can appear ambiguous, unsettling and unclear. This places an imperative upon colleges to deal with the process of change effectively, and to help those involved to make sense of…

The research literature reveals that there are many factors that influence the consistency of assessors' or examiners' judgements. One issue that has not been considered is whether National Vocational Qualifications assessors' consistency of judgement is affected by different types of evidence. In this article, 15 Customer Service and 12 Assessor…

Until the recent introduction of a dynamic interview-based process, the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), a Canadian development research funding agency, faced a challenge: project completion reports (PCRs) were not being completed in a timely and quality manner. This is a common problem many organizations face in completing…

This study addresses the issue of illusion of incompetence among elementary school children. The first objective is to examine whether teachers are able to recognize children with an illusion of incompetence. The second objective is to see whether teachers' appraisal of the behaviours and psychological characteristics of these children differ from…

Failure to separate judicial reasoning (the application of rules) from legislative reasoning (the justification of rules) in earlier studies is claimed to invalidate most previous developmental research using moral dilemma interviews. Two studies used a novel method of scoring moral dilemma interviews that separates judicial from legislative…

Similarity plays a central role in cognitive theories. Research has demonstrated that the similarity of a pair increases with its commonalities and decreases with its differences. These common and distinctive elements can take the form of parts of objects, relations between parts of properties of whole objects. Previous work has been unable to…

This exploratory study examined the college search processes of 25 non-traditional adult students at two central New York State community colleges. Using a modified time-line interview, a method developed in communication and information sciences, the researchers found that the college student's choice process was significantly different for the…

Many aspects of teaching reveal it to be an activity imbued with uncertainty. Teachers are frequently unsure of their students' knowledge and understanding, of the effects of their instructional strategies, of the most appropriate content to cover in their limited time with students, and ultimately of their own intellectual and social authority.…

A fact-finding exercise used in a study of principals' problem-solving behaviors is analyzed in this paper. Forty-two subjects with varying degrees of administrative experience participated in fact-finding and thinking-aloud exercises prior to responding to a case study. Problem definition, a key component of the problem-solving process, was a…

Previous research has found that sympathetic arousal will cue information stored in memory with a similar level of arousal. To investigate the effect of arousal on the interpretation of other people's emotions, three studies were conducted. In the first study, 37 adult tennis players, who were either about to play tennis or who had just played,…

The organization of behavioral episodes can be described at two levels: the physical level of movement and sound and the phenomenal level of action. Social perception theory and research generally operates at a phenomenal level of behavioral description. Movement and sound traditionally have been considered inadequately structured to provide much…