BackgroundFew researchers have the data required to adequately understand how the school environment impacts youth health behaviour development over time.Methods/DesignCOMPASS is a prospective cohort study designed to annually collect hierarchical longitudinal data from a sample of 90 secondary schools and the 50,000+ grade 9 to 12 students attending those schools. COMPASS uses a rigorous quasi-experimental design to evaluate how changes in school programs, policies, and/or built environment (BE) characteristics are related to changes in multiple youth health behaviours and outcomes over time. These data will allow for the quasi-experimental evaluation of natural experiments that will occur within schools over the course of COMPASS, providing a means for generating “practice based evidence” in school-based prevention programming.DiscussionCOMPASS is the first study with the infrastructure to robustly evaluate the impact that changes in multiple school-level programs, policies, and BE characteristics within or surrounding a school might have on multiple youth health behaviours or outcomes over time. COMPASS will provide valuable new insight for planning, tailoring and targeting of school-based prevention initiatives where they are most likely to have impact.

Both secondary task performance and mental effort ratings are sensitive to changes in intrinsic load among novices engaged in simulation-based learning. These measures can be used to track cognitive load during skills training. Mental effort ratings are also sensitive to small differences in intrinsic load arising from variations in the physical complexity of a simulation task. The complementary nature of these subjective and objective measures suggests their combined use is advantageous in simulation instructional design research.

All clinical psychology doctoral programs accredited by the American Psychological Association provide training in psychological assessment. However, what the programs teach and how they teach it vary widely. So, also, do beliefs about what should be taught. In this study, program descriptive materials and course syllabi from 84 programs were analyzed. Findings highlight commonalities in basic course content and supervised practice in administering, scoring, and interpreting assessment instruments as well as differences in coverage of psychometric and other assessment-related topics and in the extent to which lectures, labs, and practica are integrated.

Throughout industry, government, and education, people are worried about worker skills. This concern with "skills," however they may be defined, is evident in a number of initiatives, including the 1990 Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) and the 1994 Congressionally mandated National Skill Standards Board. These new initiatives can be traced to the problems confronting workers as we enter the 21st century (Cascio, 1995; Howard, 1995a). N o longer can one go to school for 12 years, take a job, and then do much the same thing for the next 30 years. Instead, changes in technology, global competition, and the emergence of new organizational structures have created a dynamic workplace where people are confronted with a host of complex new duties and are asked to take responsibility for their own work and their own careers.These changes, indeed, stress the need for complex performance skills and ongoing skill development. This apparently straightforward statement, however, raises many more questions than it answers. How are we to define skills in the first place? Assuming we can define the skills of interest, how are we to identify the kinds of skills likely to be required on different jobs? What do these job skill requirements, in turn, tell us about how we should go about preparing people for the jobs of the future?In this chapter we hope to provide some initial answers to these and a number of other questions about occupational skill requirements. We begin by briefly reviewing what is known about occupational skills and proposing a working definition for them. Next, we propose a taxonomy of occupational skill requirements and a strategy for obtaining measures of the skill requirements of different occupations. Finally, we present some initial evidence bearing on the reliability and validity of these measures and examine its implications for answering certain questions about workforce skills.