Examined young children's production of evaluative explanations in narratives of a story presented as a video sequence with no spoken dialogue. Examination of children in four age groups indicated that prompts greatly facilitated children's production of evaluatives and that they could adopt a global perspective on the story when formulating…

A survey of 1,272 college students showed that most believed it appropriate to use company e-mail accounts for personal messages, but inappropriate to read others' e-mail or send messages with ethnic, racial, or sexual content. Students who participated in ethics discussions were less likely to rate certain behaviors as appropriate. (Contains 22…

The perception of the effectiveness of instrumental actions is influenced by depressed mood. Depressive realism (DR) is the claim that depressed people are particularly accurate in evaluating instrumentality. In two experiments, the authors tested the DR hypothesis using an action-outcome contingency judgment task. DR effects were a function of…

Hindsight bias is the phenomenon that after people are presented with the correct answer to a question, their judgment regarding their own past answer to this question is biased toward the correct answer. In three experiments, younger and older adults gave numerical responses to general-knowledge questions and later attempted to recall their…

This study proposed and tested a developmental model of impression formation based on observed behavior, prior expectancies, and additional incongruent information. Participants were 51 kindergartners, 53 second graders, and 104 college students who provided trait and liking judgments after watching a child actor engage in behaviors from three…

People can use a variety of different strategies to perform tasks and these strategies all have two characteristics in common. First, they can be evaluated in comparison with either an absolute or a relative standard. Second, they can be used at varying levels of consistency. In the present article, the authors develop a general theory of task…

To steer a course through the world, people are almost entirely dependent on visual information, of which a key component is optic flow. In many models of locomotion, heading is described as the fundamental control variable; however, it has also been shown that fixating points along or near one's future path could be the basis of an efficient…

Educators are bombarded with data from all directions, but to effect change in the education field, they must be able to determine what key information and data are needed, understand how to use what they have learned from the data, and then use what they have learned to improve overall student achievement. Collecting and using data has become an…

Previous research has shown that synchronized flicker can facilitate detection of a single Kanizsa square. The present study investigated the role of temporally structured priming in discrimination tasks involving perceptual relations between multiple Kanizsa-type figures. Results indicate that visual information presented as temporally structured…

What are the four different types of questions of concern in an evaluation study and how can concept questions be recognized and answered? These issues are addressed in this paper, in the framework of a compensatory education program evaluation. The discussion includes (1) the identification of concept questions and how they are different from…

Considered proposals and objectives for the future of the arts in America. (RK)

Processes involved in making estimates of the value of missing information that could help in a decision making process were studied. Hypothetical purchases of ground beef were selected for the study as such purchases have the desirable property of quantifying both the price and quality. A total of 150 students at the University of Iowa rated the…

Structural views assume that a single, comprehensive system of thought underlies cognitive activity. Although developmental research with both children and adults has tended to assume the validity of a structural model of cognitive development, this assumption may be invalid when applied to the social cognitive judgments of adults. There are two…

Evaluation research is conceived as a question answering process. Four strategies are suggested which emerged from four approaches to the study of questions. Evaluation questions must be identified and classified before research can effectively begin. This paper discusses the four approaches to studying evaluation research questions and their…

Author provided examples to help teachers begin work in evaluative listening in their classes and considered the influence of advertising on children. (Author/RK)