Five studies are presented—all related to the de velopment and application of a self-report inventory for measuring individual differences in learning processes. Factor analysis of items derived by trans lating laboratory learning processes into the context of academic study yielded four scales: Synthesis- Analysis, Study Methods, Fact Retention, and Elab orative Processing. There were no sex differences, and the scales demonstrated acceptable reliabilities. The Synthesis-Analysis and Elaborative Processing scales both assess aspects of information processing (including depth of processing), but Synthesis- Analysis assesses organizational processes, while Elaborative Processing deals with active, elaborative approaches to encoding. These two scales were positively related to performance under incidental learning instructions in both a lecture-learning and traditional verbal-learning study. Study Methods assessed adherence to systematic, traditional study techniques. This scale was positively related to per formance in the intentional condition of the verbal learning study. The Fact Retention scale assessed the propensity to retain detailed, factual informa tion. It was positively related to performance in the incidental condition of the verbal-learning but not the lecture-learning study. Future research and ap plications are discussed.

No abstract

No abstract

This study tested the hypothesis that the correlation between the STAI A-State and A-Trait scales is spuriously high because some of the items in these scales have low content saturation. As measured by Jackson's (1970) Differential Reliability Index, content saturation was found to be high for only 7 A-State and A-Trait items. It was demonstrated that new A-State and A-Trait scales based on these items with high content saturation had high internal consistency reliability and low intercorrelation, and were also very highly correlated with the original STAI scales. These results provided strong support for the tested hypothesis. Implications of these results were discussed for revising the STAI.

Ramanaiah, Schill, and Leung (1977) reported empirical evidence supporting Millham's (1974) hypothesis that attribution and denial are two separate components of the MC-SD scale. This paper presents the results of two studies conducted to test the hypothesis that the results obtained by Ramanaiah et al. (1977) may be attributed to method variance caused by the keying direction in the MC-SD attribution and denial subscales. The first study was concerned with the development of balanced attribution and denial scales, while the second study investigated whether the results from Ramanaiah et al., which used the original unbalanced attribution and denial scales, could be replicated with the balanced scales developed in Study I. The results strongly supported the tested hypothesis, indicating that the two subscales are measuring essentially the same construct.