Kathleen M. Galotti

How Do High School Students Structure an Important Life Decision? A Short-Term Longitudinal Study of the College Decision-Making Process.

This study details the processes students use and the information they consider as they confront what is likely to be their first major life decision. Over the course of a year, 322 college-bound high school students participated in up to three survey sessions in which they described their thinking about college decisions. At each session, students rated the frequency with which they had consulted various sources of information or engaged in different decision-making activities. They also listed and rated the importance of the criteria they were using, and listed the schools they were actively considering. Responses were analyzed as a function of time of survey, level of parental education, academic ability, and gender. Throughout the year, students considered roughly the same number and type of criteria. There were expected shifts in the kinds of information sought and activities undertaken. Higher-ability students listed significantly more criteria and slightly (but nonsignificantly) more schools than did students of other ability levels, especially early in the process. A variety of gender differences emerged in the information sought and the criteria used to make this decision.

Natural command names and initial learning: a study of text-editing terms

In the first of two studies of “naturalness” in command names, computer-naive typists composed instructions to “someone else” for correcting a sample text. There was great variety in their task-descriptive lexicon and a lack of correspondence between both their vocabulary and their underlying conceptions of the editing operations and those of some computerized text editors. In the second study, computer-naive typists spent two hours learning minimal text-editing systems that varied in several ways. Lexical naturalness (frequency of use in Study 1) made little difference in their performance. By contrast, having different, rather than the same names for operations requiring different syntax greatly reduced difficulty. It is concluded that the design of user-compatible commands involves deeper issues than are captured by the slogan “naturalness.” However, there are limitations to our observations. Only initial learning of a small set of commands was at issue and generalizations to other situations will require further testing.

A New Way of Assessing Ways of Knowing: The Attitudes Toward Thinking and Learning Survey (ATTLS)

In four studies, college students (both male andfemale, predominantly white) filled out a 50-item surveyconsisting of statements illustrating“separate” (critical, detached) and“connected” (empathic) ways of knowing (Belenky, Clinchy, G oldberger,& Tarule, 1986). The instrument showed acceptableinternal reliability. Scores on the two scales wereuncorrelated, supporting the view that the twoepistemological positions are independent. Females consistentlyrated connected knowing (CK) statements higher thanseparate knowing (SK) statements, while males showed aslight, but non-significant difference favoring SK statements. When participants were dividedinto groups using a joint median split of the two ratingscores, females were disproportionately likely to beplaced in the High CK-Low SK group. CK and SK scores were unrelated to performance on avariety of cognitive tasks, but were related to somemeasures of preference, suggesting that ways of knowingmay function more as approaches or styles rather than basic abilities.

Children's differential performance on deductive and inductive syllogisms.

At what age and in what ways do children distinguish deductive and inductive problems? In Experiment 1, students from kindergarten and from Grades 2, 4, and 6 were presented with deductive or inductive inference problems and asked to draw an inference and rate their confidence. By 4th grade, confidence ratings for deductive problems were higher than those for inductive problems, and responses were faster for deductive than for inductive items. In Experiment 2, students from Grades 2, 3, 4, and 5 responded to the same problems used in Experiment 1 but were asked to provide explanations for their responses. Again, confidence was higher with deductive than with inductive problems, and latency to respond was faster for deductive than for inductive items. Further, explanations differed as a function of the type of problem. These findings help fill in gaps in the emerging picture of the development of childrens reasoning skills.

Older adolescents' thinking about academic/vocational and interpersonal commitments

Sixty-eight college students listed the factors they consider or would consider when making the following commitments: choosing courses, choosing a major, choosing a career, choosing a friend, choosing a romantic partner, and choosing a lifelong partner. In addition, subjects provided their own definition ofcommitment in an unstructured essay. Subjects listed more factors, more distinct types of factors, and more original factors for interpersonal commitments than for academic/vocational commitments. There were few gender differences found in these measures, contradicting the idea that men and women think differently about different commitments. In addition, few gender or class year differences were found in the themes present in the essay definingcommitment. Conceptions of commitment, as described in essays, predicted thinking about specific commitments only slightly.

Everyday planning: An analysis of daily time management

We assessed planning, prioritization, and completion of daily activities for 88 college students. Subjects listed and prioritized their goals for the following day, and 2 days later, they reported their accomplishments. Subjects also defined “planning” in a short essay. Self-reported good and poor planners did not differ in the proportion of goals completed or in sensitivity to goal priority, but definitions of planning did differ.

Helps and hindrances for adolescents making important real-life decisions

Abstract This article presents data from college students reminiscing about important decisions they have made in the last year. Students who consider more alternatives report more stress and difficulty while they are in the process of making the decision. Students with a connected knowing (CK) epistemological style report themselves to draw on intuition and report more certainty and comfort with the decision; students with a separate knowing (SK) epistemological style report using a more analytic approach to decision-making. Students who report themselves to be good planners are significantly more certain they have made the right decision, more comfortable with the process, more satisfied with the information they have gathered, more likely to consider future consequences of their decision, and more likely to make their decision based on their overall values or principles. These findings are discussed in terms of what educators might do to help adolescents improve decision-making.

Gender and developmental differences in adolescents' conceptions of moral reasoning.

Eighth graders, 11th graders, and college sophomores wrote open-ended essays that characterized their own approaches to moral reasoning. Their essays were scored for the presence of various themes. Students also responded to three dilemmas from the Defining Issues Test (Rest, 1979). Students then rated their own use of justice and care orientations in moral reasoning, using a previously developed instrument (Ford and Lowery, 1986; Lyons, 1983). Characterizations of moral reasoning became more multifaceted and thorough with grade, and correlated with many traditional measures of moral reasoning. Males and females showed some, but relatively few, differences in characterizing their own moral reasoning, although females tended to respond more thoroughly to the open-ended task. Gender differences, when they occurred, were mostly found on measures that assessed so-called feminine issues or concerns, but not on traditional measures of moral reasoning. Characterizations of moral reasoning clustered into five dimensions, raising questions about the utility of the constructs of justice and care orientations.

What non-programmers know about programming: natural language procedure specification

Abstract Part of learning to program involves learning to use control statements. This study examined the spontaneous use by non-programmers of control statements when writing instructions. Previous work suggested that non-programmers rarely use such statements in their instructions. The present findings demonstrate that non-programmers can and do use control statements when their use is appropriate for the recipient of the instructions. Some methodological problems involved in the demonstration of basic competence are discussed.

What Makes a Difference When? Comments on Grudin and Barnard

Taken together with earlier work on command naming, Grudin and Barnards results suggest that “specificity” and “meaningfulness” may be important while “naturalness” is not. However, important methodological problems are raised by experiments like this, in which conditions are arranged to maximize the effect of theoretically interesting variables while reducing overall similarity to real tasks.