Juvenile crime is a serious problem for which no treatment approach has been found to be reliably effective. This outcome evaluation assessed during and posttreatment effectiveness of Teaching-Family group home treatment programs for juvenile offenders. The evaluation included the original Achievement Place program, which was the prototype for the development of the Teaching-Family treatment approach, 12 replications of Achievement Place, and 9 comparison group home programs. Primary dependent measures were retrieved from court and police files and included number of alleged offenses, percentage of youths involved in those alleged offenses, and percentage of youths institutionalized. Other dependent measures were subjective ratings of effectiveness obtained from the program consumers, including the group home residents. The results showed difference during treatment favoring the Teaching-Family programs on rate of alleged criminal offenses, percentage of youths involved in those offenses, and consumer ratings of the programs. The consumer ratings provided by the youths and their school teachers were found to be inversely and significantly correlated with the reduction of criminal offenses during treatment. There were no significant differences during treatment on measures of noncriminal offenses (e.g., truancy, runaway, and curfew violations). In the posttreatment year, none of the differences between the groups was significant on any of the outcome measures. The results are discussed in terms of measurement and design issues in the evaluation of delinquency treatment programs and in relation to the evaluation of Teaching-Family group homes by Richard Jones and his colleagues.

A controlled study of the impact of a juvenile education program on the recidivism rates of juveniles was performed. The program involved introducing the juveniles to the realities of prison life. No significant differences between experimental and control groups in the mean number of self-reported status or criminal offenses committed during the premeasure or follow-up period was found. A finding that youths categorized as more delinquent were affected differently by program attendance compared to youths categorized as less delinquent is offered as a tentative explanation of the conflicting results of prior studies of this type of intervention.Although the adult criminal justice system has been charged with protecting society, implementing the processes of punishment and retribution, and the rehabilitation of convicted offenders, the task of the juvenile justice system in this country is more circumscribed. According to Romig (1978: xxii), the juvenile system &dquo;is clear in its authorized mission-to rehabilitate,&dquo; that is, to divert the young offender from further delinquent activity and subsequent adult criminal behavior.The ability to evaluate accurately the effects of rehabilitative efforts is essential both because of budgetary considerations and because of the potential problems associated with intervening in young lives. Unfortunately, of the 982 studies published since 1920 that were reviewed by Romig, only 170 met the essential requirements of either random or

In four studies, 3-, 6-, and 9-month-old human infants were tested in a discrimination learning task in which visual fixation to a particular stimulus or lateral position was reinforced with an auditory stimulus. In Experiment 1, all age groups exhibited acquisition, extinction, and reinstatement of fixation to the reinforced target or position. Experiment 2 revealed that 3-month-olds retained the positional discrimination but not the stimulus discrimination after a 5-min delay between acquisition and extinction; older infants retained both types of discriminations. In Experiments 3 and 4 we investigated a possible developmental shift in the dominance of positional versus stimulus cues by training infants on displays in which stimulus and position were confounded and then by dissociating the cues on test trials. Results from both experiments indicated positional cue dominance for young infants and stimulus cue dominance for older infants. The findings are discussed in terms of differences in the attentional demands elicited by proprioceptive versus exteroceptive cues.