Carson McGuire

Dimensions of Talented Behavior

people modify the educative process so as to foster and influence these changes? Which boys and girls respond to such opportunities? How are different kinds of abilities affected by variations in personality makeup and by pressures imposed by parents, age-mates, and significant elders in the community? Some answers to these and related questions, as well as to problems of method, are being sought in the Human Talent Project begun in 1957 with all boys and girls entering the seventh grades in the schools of four mediumsized Texas communities.

Multiple Discriminant Prediction of Delinquency and School Dropouts

PREDICTION studies of socially disvalued behaviors among male adolescents often neglect either crossvalidation procedures or the influence of incarceration upon the S’s test performance (Glueck and Glueck, 1950; Gough and Peterson, 1952; Sarbin and Jones, 1955). A further limitation of these studies is that they often deal only with extreme deviants (incarcerated repeated offenders). To be sure, these studies have provided valuable evidence concerning variables associated with deviancy. The present study departs from the typical ex post facto study in the following ways. (1) The predictor data were collected prior to the acting out of the criterion behavior.2 (2) A simultaneous double crossvalidation was carried out. (3) Two levels of deviancy were investigated. (4) The data from three criterion groups were subjected to a Multiple Discriminant Analysis, which provides more information than two independent regression analyses. The three-group criterion was &dquo;normals,&dquo; dropouts, and delinquents (see Method for definitions). Predictor variables were selected on the basis of a major theme evident in a host of studies, that delinquents are more impulsive than are nondelinquents (McCord and McCord, 1956; Gough and Peterson, 1952; Glueck and Glueck, 1950). Furthermore, Lichter (1962, pp. 41-47) has indicated that school drop-outs also express difficulty in controlling impulses. Sarbin and Jones (1955), operating from a theoretical orientation based upon the impulsivity construct, reported that incarcerated

Toward a Theory of Intelligent Behavior: A Proposed Model.

Education is seen as a behavioral science consisting of planned intervention into developmental sequence. Intelligent behavior is the objective of education; the purpose is behavior modification toward socially determined criteria. With a dyadic model, intelligent behavior is shown to be the result of the invariant processes of (a) reciprocal interaction between the organism and its genetic, internal, and external environments, (b) the acquisition of experience which involves transformation within the organism, and (c) the development of central processes of control. The operational principle is seen as continuity-discontinuity in feedback from the organism-environment interaction.