Mismatch of school desks and chairs by ethnicity and grade level in middle school

The purpose of this article is to introduce the cross-disciplinary competency standards for work-related assessments, why they are needed and how they have been developed in New South Wales (NSW). Cross-disciplinary competency standards communicate the benchmarks for effective performance of work-related assessments. They outline what is expected of rehabilitation professionals, including the ability to apply and transfer competence across different conditions and workplace contexts. Outcomes in occupational rehabilitation are affected by the efficacy of the work-related assessments performed, which is dependent upon competent, clinical decision-making by rehabilitation professionals. However, in Australia, work-related assessment practice is not governed by universally accepted competency standards or by any competency-based training/education and assessment system. To enhance professional practice, WorkCover NSW has developed cross-disciplinary competency standards for work-related a ssessments. The competencies provide (i) quality standards for professional workplace training and development, (ii) benchmarks for assessing the competence of rehabilitation professionals, (iii) a framework for evidence-based practice, (iv) benchmarks for measuring service quality and (v) "real world" learning outcomes and assessment criteria for professional education programs.     

The "experimenting agency". The California Youth Authority Research Division

During the 1960s and 1970s, the California Youth Authority embarked on a series of randomized field trials to test interventions for juvenile and young adult offenders. This article examines the institutional and political reasons why rigorous tests were adopted for such interventions as the Community Treatment Program. It also describes the effect these trials had on the agency and on California justice, as well as how the experimental method eventually became less often used in the Youth Authority. The authors explore some general reasons why this happened.     

Longitudinal associations among adolescents’ organized activity involvement and sociopolitical values

Organized activities represent a potentially important context for the development of adolescent sociopolitical values, but few studies have examined longitudinal associations between youths’ sociopolitical values and activity involvement. Adolescents (N = 299, Time 1 M_age = 15.49, SD = .93, 62% female) reported on their organized activity involvement (volunteering, church, sports, arts/music, school and community clubs) and sociopolitical values (materialism, social dominance, authoritarianism, patriotism, spirituality) at baseline and one year later. Greater involvement in arts/music predicted lower spirituality and patriotism one year later and greater involvement in church predicted higher levels of spirituality and lower levels of social dominance one year later. Higher levels of materialism predicted less involvement in arts/music one year later and higher social dominance values predicted less involvement in volunteering one year later. Findings support the importance of organized activities in sociopolitical development, and suggest that sociopolitical values may guide decisions concerning future organized activity involvement.     

Consumer racial discrimination: A reassessment of the market for baseball cards

Research on the presence of consumer racial discrimination in the baseball labor and memorabilia markets has produced contradictory empirical results. While studies of baseball salaries find no evidence of discrimination, Nardinelli and Simon (1990) and Andersen and La Croix (1991) use data from the baseball card market to show that the price that consumers pay for a card depends on the player’s race. In this paper, we reconsider the evidence of consumer discrimination in the baseball card market. Our study improves on previous research by applying more appropriate econometric methods and using a data set in which card supply is constant and incentives for speculative demand are weaker. In contradiction to the aforementioned studies, we find little evidence of racial discrimination. This result proves robust across variable specifications and econometric models. The authors thank Tyler Cowen, Kevin Grier, David Levy, Barb McKiernan, Don Palmer, Dan Sutler, and Bob Tollison for helpful suggestions on an earlier draft.     

Evaluating the Simplified Conjoint Expected Risk Model: Comparing the Use of Objective and Subjective Information

The simplified Conjoint Expected Risk (CER) model by Holtgrave and Weber posits that perceived risk is a linear combination of the subjective judgments of the probabilities of harm, benefit, and status quo, and the expected harm and benefit of an activity. It modifies Luce and Weber's original CER model—that uses objective information to evaluate financial gambles—to accommodate activities such as health/technology activities where values of the model variables are subjective. If the simplified model is a valid modification of the original model, its performance should not be sensitive to the use of subjective information. However, because people may evaluate information differently when objective information is provided to them than when they generate information on their own, the performance of the simplified CER model may not be robust to the source of model-variable information. We compared the use of objective and subjective information, and results indicate that the estimates of the simplified CER model parameters and the proportion of variance in risk judgments accounted for by the model are similar under these two conditions. Thus, the simplified CER model is viable with activities for which harm and benefit information is subjective.