Alan Branthwaite

Underlining Can Make a Difference—Sometimes

AbstractIn a review of the literature on the effectiveness of experimenter-provided and learner-generated underlining, the investigators discovered (i) that few studies, if any, provide clear-cut support for the effectiveness of underlining; (ii) that a limited number of methods of testing recall have been used; (iii) that little is known of how children benefit (or don’t benefit) from underlining; and (iv) that long-term recall has been overlooked. A study is subsequently described in which sixth grade children were presented with experimenter-underlined or normal text, and recall was tested by the cloze procedure. It was found that the underlined words were recalled, both immediately and in the long term (seven days later), significantly better by children who had studied the underlined text, and that this result was not obtained at the expense of other items of information in the text.

The psychologist as wordsmith: a questionnaire study of the writing strategies of productive British psychologists

Eighty-eight productive British psychologists completed a questionnaire on their writing habits and on their attitudes to and feelings about academic writing. The data were analysed in three ways. Firstly, an overall descriptive profile of the ‘average’ productive writer was drawn up by examining the most frequent responses to individual items on the questionnaire. Secondly, cluster analyses were carried out to determine if there were groups of productive individuals who set about their writing in distinctive ways. These analyses revealed groups of writers who could be distinguished in terms of their styles of composition (labelled ‘thinkers’ versus ‘doers’) and in terms of their attitudes and feelings (labelled ‘anxious’ versus ‘enthusiastic’). Thirdly, step-wise regression was used to isolate correlates of higher productivity for different products - books, book chapters and papers. The results suggested that different writing patterns accompanied the production of these different products. The highly productive writers of books were less likely to claim to be sporadic writers, and more likely to claim that they did sections of their writing in a single draft. The highly productive writers of chapters were more likely to be responding to commissions to write for an editor or colleague and their writing was aided a good deal by secretarial provision. The highly productive writers of papers did not always enjoy expressing what they wanted to say as much as their less productive colleagues, but they felt that their writing was very important to them. These findings are discussed in relation to research on academic writing in other disciplines, and the paper concludes with some prescriptive advice to authors should they wish to increase their productivity.

Unreliability of Marking: further evidence and a possible explanation

ABSTRACT Marking of essays and examination papers is known to be unreliable in several ways. Some further evidence of this lack of agreement by markers is presented from an investigation of naturally occurring student ‘malpractices’. In a search for explanation of the causes for marker unreliability, a second study investigated the effects of examiner personality. It was found that the marks given to an essay were unrelated to E, N or P scores on the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire but were positively correlated with L scores. This finding raises interesting hypotheses about the effect of staff‐student interactions on biases in marking. In particular ‘social desirability’ seems to be a variable worth further investigation.

Ambiguities in Watkins and Wiebe's Regression Analysis of the McCarthy Scales of Children's Abilities.

WATKINS and Wiebe (1980) investigated the construct validity of the McCarthy Scales of Children’s Abilities (MSCA) (McCarthy, 1972) by using regression techniques with data from 240 preschool children. Suitable for children in the age range from 2V2 to 8Y2 years, MSCA comprises 18 subtests placed into six overlapping scales: Verbal, Perceptual-Performance, Quantitative, General Cognitive, Memory, and Motor. Although Watkins and Wiebe concluded that their data supported the existence of a General Cognitive Index and Verbal and Perceptual-Performance Scales only weak evidence, if any, for Quantitative, Memory, or Motor Scales appeared. Unfortunately, there appear to be some ambiguities in the analyses on which these conclusions were based or, at the very least, an insufficient explanation in the paper to evaluate the authors’ procedures. The purpose of this paper was to present two main criticisms of the article by Watkins and Wiebe: (a) the first pertaining to the nature of the data presented and (b) the second concerning the accuracy and appropriateness of the statistical procedures employed.

Finding fault with criticisms of the McCarthy Scales of Children's Abilities

Summary The McCarthy Scales are a versatile and increasingly popular test of childrens cognitive abilities. However, much of their high standing as an assessment instrument rests on the construct validity of each of the ability scales. A major recent study of the construct validity of the McCarthy Scales concluded that only the General Cognitive Index stood up to critical evaluation. The purpose of the present paper is to highlight some inadequacies in this critical study, and then to give an evaluation of the construct validity of the McCarthy Scales which is based on the findings from recent British research.