Student ratings of teaching: validity of several rating factors.

Students' ratings of their instructors in undergraduate classes in calculus were correlated with class performance on a common final examination. Ratings on several instructional factors were highly related to class performance even though they appeared to be independent of the students' own grades.

Magnesium pemoline: effect on avoidance conditioning in rats.

Rats administered 20 milligrams of magnesium pemoline per kilo gram of body weight learned to avoid shock in a jump-out apparatus in fewer trials than did controls. However, the results suggested that the principal effect of the drug was to facilitate the avoidance behavior of those animals that tended to "freeze" in response to electric grid shock. No differences in retention were observed between experimental and control animals that had achieved equal levels of learnine.

Unconditional stimulus characteristics in rabbit eyelid conditioning.

Three experiments employed aversive or positive subcortical electrical stimulation in an unconditional stimulus (US) role in rabbit eyelid conditioning. Conditional response (CR) development to a tonal conditional stimulus (CS) was examined when the intracranial stimulation was combined with a conventional cheek-shock US (Experiment 1) or with a lightflash US (Experiment 2). Our findings were consistent with previus observations that the affective impact of the US is important in the development of an overt motor CR. The complex pattern of our results, however, implies that intracranial stimulation has multiple effects on conditioning and argues against any unidimensional interpretation of these outcomes. Our analysis of CR-contingent intracranial stimulation presentation in Experiment 3 indicated that such stimulation does not act as a Thorndikian reward or punishment in rabbit eyelid conditioning.

The eye blink as a time-locked response: implications for serial and second-order conditioning.

A series of experiments were conducted to determine what factors control responding to the first element of a two-element serial compound in rabbit eyelid conditioning. An examination of response topography indicated that the eye-blink CR is rigidly timed to occur when the US is expected. This response-system characteristic prevents the occurrence of a CR during the first element of a serial compound or during the second-order CS in second-order conditioning. The comparison of a serial gap procedure with conventional serial and trace conditioning procedures suggested that the associative strength of the first element of a serial CS is not strongly influenced by either a second-order conditioning process or by the variable-reinforcement principle.

The nutrition care profile: an aid to delivery of quality nutrition care in a small community hospital.

In an effort to improve nutrition care in a small community hospital with one registered dietitian (R.D.), a system using a nutrition care profile (NCP) and a certified dietetic assistant (C.D.A.) was developed. The NCP includes criteria recognized in the literature or through clinical experience to be indicators of nutrition care needs. The profile is completed by the C.D.A. and reviewed by the R.D., who determines priorities for the patient's nutrition care needs. The NCP has proved to be an effective and efficient tool for prioritizing and systematizing follow-up of nutrition care needs. Indeed, because the NCP form is itself so effective as a follow-up tool for dietary records, the R.D. has found she must make a conscious effort to document nutrition care in the medical record.

Perceptual skill in the game of Othello.

Three experiments were conducted extending research on chess and Go to the game of Othello. Experiment 1 demonstrated that expert Othello players, in comparison to nonplayers of the game, are superior at recalling meaningful game configurations but are not better at recalling random positions. Experiment 2 demonstrated that expert players can learn a sequence of moves from an Othello game much more rapidly than nonplayers can. Experiment 3 examined chunking behavior and found that experts and nonplayers perceive different patterns of piece clusters in an Othello position. These results indicate that skill in Othello is cognitively organized in a manner similar to chess skill. Because Othello provides a less complex environment than chess and Go, efforts to model human skill in strategy games may be profitably pursued with Othello.

Recall memory for visually presented chess positions.

A series of three experiments replicated and extended earlier research reported by Chase and Simon (1973), de Groot (1965), and Charness (Note 1). The first experiment demonstrated that the relationship between memory for chess positions and chess skill varies directly with the amount of chess-specific information in the stimulus display. The second experiment employed tachistoscopic displays to incrementally "build" tournament chess positions by meaningful or nonmeaningful chunks and demonstrated that meaningful piece groupings during presentation markedly enhance subsequent recall performance. The third experiment tested memory for one of two positions presented in immediate sequence and demonstrated that explanations based on a limited-capacity short-term memory (Chase & Simon, 1973) are not adequate for explaining performance on this memory task.