Critical teaching incidents. Recollections of deaf college students.

In interviews with 56 deaf college students, we collected accounts of 839 "critical incidents" describing effective and ineffective teaching. From those incidents, 33 specific teaching characteristics were derived and were analyzed in relation to teacher, student, and course variables. Our primary goal was to identify the teaching characteristics underlying deaf students' recollections about their classroom learning experiences. The most frequently mentioned characteristics are similar to those found in studies of hearing college students, particularly within the domain of Teacher Affect. The teacher's ability to communicate clearly in sign language, however, was not only a characteristic unique to deaf college students but also the most frequently occurring characteristic of effective teaching in this study.

The effects of adjunct questions in prose for deaf and hearing students at different reading levels.

In two studies, the author investigated interactions among adjunct question position, reading ability, and direct versus indirect learning outcomes for deaf postsecondary and hearing middle-school students. Adjunct questions were inserted immediately preceding or following brief sections of instructional prose for the purpose of focusing and cognitively activating the readers. Different effects were observed for deaf and hearing readers and for different levels of assessed reading ability. The findings are discussed in terms of reading ability, adjunct activities while reading prose, and direct versus indirect instructive effects.

Adjunct questions in prose: a question position-by-reading ability interaction.

Immediate factual learning performance of profoundly deaf postsecondary students was compared as a result of pre-, post- or no adjunct questions interspersed throughout a passage of prose. Analyses revealed a position-by-reading ability interaction. While pre-questions yielded the highest learning performance for low ability readers, post-questions resulted in significantly greater learning performance for high ability readers. Findings are discussed in terms of question position, student's reading ability, and text difficulty.

The effect of certain rater roles on confidence in physician's assistant ratings.

Previous research on the psychology of confidence suggests that the more confident a rater is in his judgment the more accurate is his rating. The purpose of the present study was to investigate possible differences among raters in their confidence in competency ratings which they had provided. Results indicated significant differences due to the rater's interpersonal role with the ratee and the particular aspect of competence rated. Greater simple structure of competence ratings when adjusted for rater confidence is also shown. Rater confidence is discussed as an index for rater selection and as a moderator variable for competence ratings.

Relationships between clinical competence ratings and examination performance.

Relationships between faculty ratings and performance on components of the National Board of Medical Examiners Certifying Examination for Primary Care Physician's Assistants were investigated. A factor analysis of the clinical competence rating form yielded three discrete factors. Results of tests of simple relationships between each rating factor and examination component indicated that four of the six examination components correlated significantly though modestly with at least one of the rating scale factors. The results of multiple regression analyses indicated complex relationships between each of two examination components and the set of rating factors. One implication is that faculty members are able to make discrete judgments about students on more than one dimension.