http://hdl.handle.net/10027/7209 Tue, 21 May 2013 07:21:47 GMT 2013-05-21T07:21:47Z http://hdl.handle.net/10027/9810 The Effect of School Rape-Supportive Norms on Rape Proclivity Rape prevention programs have recently begun using social norms interventions in addition to, or in lieu of, individual-level interventions. These programs assume that rape-supportive social norms influence the likelihood of rape. The current study tests that assumption by analyzing how school-level aggregates of men‘s rape myth acceptance (RMA) and hostile masculinity affect rape proclivity. Data for this study come from 1326 male students in 11 high schools throughout Illinois. At the individual level, risk and protective factors were similar to past studies: higher RMA and hostile masculinity were associated with increases in rape proclivity. Conversely, believing men have a responsibility to prevent rape, that they would personally intervene to prevent assault, and that there are negative consequences for perpetrating rape were all associated with decreased rape proclivity. After controlling for these individual factors, results indicate that higher school social norms for hostile masculinity increase the odds of reporting some likelihood of sexual assault. Against hypotheses, school social norms for RMA did not have a direct negative effect on proclivity; however, these results were partially qualified by interactions. School social norms for RMA appear to affect students differently depending on their own RMA. Results support efforts to target both individual and community-level factors. Implications for prevention programs are discussed. Thu, 21 Feb 2013 06:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10027/9810 2013-02-21T06:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10027/9791 The Role of Genre Expectation in Literary Readers Engagement in Interpretative Literary Reasoning Previous research has shown that the expectation of a particular literary genre (poetry vs. prose) affected how readers construed the meaning of the text as manifest in think-aloud comments (Peskin, 2007). The current study was designed to replicate and extend these findings using longer literary texts and essays instead of think-alouds to assess meaning making. Two texts by the same author were presented to 89 college students, one presented in a typical prose format (as a paragraph) and the other laid out like a more typical poem. Each text appeared equally often as poem or as prose across participants. Essays were coded for six kinds of behaviors related to literary interpretation. The data yielded mixed evidence for the genre expectation effect. Factors that may have affected the relationship between genre manipulation and interpretative reasoning are discussed. Thu, 21 Feb 2013 06:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10027/9791 2013-02-21T06:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10027/9715 Creating Mappings When Learning From Multiple Representations: The Role of Self-Generation Students are often able to learn a concept effectively if it is presented in multiple formats and they map common elements across the representations (Ainsworth, 2006). However, low-knowledge learners often fail to do this. Recent research has demonstrated some benefits to learning for low-knowledge individuals who explain commonalities in representations that are provided to them (Berthold & Renkl, 2009). The present study tested whether there was an advantage to having learners generate their own scaffolded mappings and explain them compared to explaining provided mappings, especially with respect to conceptual, as opposed to procedural, understanding of the to-be-learned material. Seventy-five low-knowledge participants studied worked-examples of probability word problems as they generated explanations under one of three conditions: when no mappings were provided, when researcher-produced mappings were provided, or when the participant generated the mappings with scaffolded assistance. Participants were also instructed to think-aloud during the study process, in contrast to prior work on this topic. Results indicate the condition that required explaining scaffolded learner-generated mappings led to higher conceptual, but not procedural, knowledge at post-test compared to the researcher-provided mappings or no mapping conditions. Analyses of think-aloud protocols collected during the solution process suggest that these findings may be due to the higher number of conceptual justification statements produced when learners generate their own mappings. Additionally, there is evidence that these types of justification statements mediated the relationship between the acquisition of conceptual knowledge and the types of mappings learners made between the multiple representations. Thu, 21 Feb 2013 06:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10027/9715 2013-02-21T06:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10027/9703 The Concept of Reliability: Putting the "Psyche" into Psychometric Reliability typically is regarded as a property of scales. If one’s scores are (in)consistent from time 1 to time 2, the test is assumed to be (un)reliable. However, an alternative conceptualization of reliability is that it is a property of persons and their responses; test scores are 'reliable' when a person responds to test items in a manner that is consistent, which implies that a test could be reliable for one person but not for another. Two studies were conducted to test the hypotheses that people who are schematic for a trait will provide more consistent responses both within test items (internal consistency) and across test sessions (retest reliability) than people who are aschematic for the trait. An internet study provided evidence partially supportive of the hypothesis; schematics displayed higher internal reliability than aschematics on two trait measures. In the second study, conducted in two waves in a psychology laboratory, although we obtained evidence for successfully measuring schemas, contrary to the retest hypothesis, there were no differences between schematic and aschematic alphas across the testing sessions. Thu, 21 Feb 2013 06:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10027/9703 2013-02-21T06:00:00Z