Leonard D. Goodstein

Effects of different feedback conditions on verbal discrimination learning in schizophrenic and nonpsychiatric subjects

Summary Subjects were given two verbal discrimination tasks in which they were required to learn and call out the correct member in each of a series of word pairs. The S s in one of the experimental conditions were informed that E would say “Right” after each correct choice and nothing after each incorrect one, and those in a second condition that E would say “Wrong” after each incorrect choice and nothing after each correct one. In a third condition, S s received their information by being shown the correct word following their choice. Groups of hospitalized schizophrenics, nonpsychiatric medical patients, and college students were tested in each condition. In all three groups, performance was best under the Information condition, but there were no significant differences in performance between the groups given the two verbal reinforcement procedures. Further analyses suggested that E s failure to respond had the same effect on performance as the overt response of “Right” in the Wrong-Nothing groups and of “Wrong” in the Right-Nothing groups.

Personality Correlates of Academic Adjustment

College achievement, as indicated by over-all grade-point average (GPA), consists of several more or less well-established variance components. The major component, as demonstrated by over thirty years of research on the prediction of college grades (Harris, 1740; Garrett, 1747; Fishman & Pasanella, 1960), is intellective. Measures of scholastic aptitude and achievemenc and indices of previous performance, such as high school GPA and class rank, correlate in the .50s and .6Os with college achievemenc, which means that they account for approximately 25 to 35% of the total variance in the criterion (Fig. 1 ) . These estimates are based upon relationships between predictors (measures of aptitude and achievemenc) and criteria (GPA) which are continuous variables, unrestricted in range, and linearly related, as specified in the zero-order and multiple regression models. Stern, Stein, and Bloom (1756) have questioned the appropriateness of these models for the prediction of college achievement, because

Predicting Student Success in Graduate Business Courses

At the request of the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Business Administration, the Counseling Center began a study in the fall of 1957 to determine the relationship between selected psychological tests and course grades. Rapidly increasing enrollments in graduate education in business administration demand more effective methods of student selection. Are intelligence tests and personality inventories of value?

Verbal Conditioning in a New Sentence Construction Task: A Further Study

The previously obtained results in verbal conditioning with a new sentence construction task were shown in this study to be independent of sex of both S and E. It was shown that the conditioning of names beginning with L and M was possible, although there was a significant initial preference for M names. These results further demonstrated that conditioning on this task was restricted exclusively to the aware Ss.