I guess I just grew sick and tired of the same old request after almost every presentation I made at conferences involving developmental psychologists: “Trevor, could you just give me a simple ten minute explanation of what Rasch analysis is all about? ” After a dozen or so inquiries of this nature, I thought there must be a shortcut. A couple of us Piagetians gathered and devel-oped a little web site for developmentalists interested in Rasch analysis. When we tried to sug-gest introductory readings for our colleagues — many of whom had very little explicit training in statistics or quantitative research methodology — we realized that we could not produce the goods. That’s not to deny in any way the importance of the classic Rasch texts — Wright and Stone, Andrich, Wright and Masters, and that of Georg Rasch himself. It highlighted, however, the absence of an introductory text — a text that would take an interested beginner to the point of being able to participate in the wider Rasch collegial community. So really, I had the plan for the book in my mind for more than a couple of years. And the book would still be just that — plan in my mind — if I hadn’t had the good fortune to meet Christine Fox at a Midwest Objective Measurement Seminar (MOMS) meeting in Chicago. Con-

This review collates and examines critically a theoretically convergent but widely dispersed body of research on the influence of external environments on the functioning of families as contexts of human development. Investigations falling within this expanding domain include studies

of psycholinguistic research is to devise an explanatory account of the mental operations that underlie these linguistic abilities. In pursuing this goal, we have adopted what we call the Competence Hypothesis as a methodological principle. We assume that an explanatory model of human language performance

its omnipresence across the social sciences and humanities, nowhere is there a general statement of framing theory that shows exactly how frames become embedded within and make themselves manifest in a text, or how framing influences thinking. Analysis of this concept suggests how the discipline

, specifically designed to test predictions from this extension of the theory, have now been completed Hypothesis I: There exists, in the human organism, a drive to evaluate his opinions and his abilities. While opinions and abilities may, at first glance, seem to be quite different things, there is a close

research directions in the field. A cross a wide variety of fields, data are being collected and accumulated at a dramatic pace. There is an urgent need for a new generation of computational theories and tools to assist humans in extracting useful information (knowledge) from the rapidly growing volumes

are characteristic of normal human thought. Moreover, these illusions appear to promote other criteria of mental health, including the ability to care about others, the ability to be happy or contented, and the ability to engage in productive and creative work. These strategies may succeed, in large part, because

and in the basic infrastructures of science, business, and social interaction. For human-computer interaction to advance in the new millennium we need to better understand the emerging dynamic of interaction in which the focus task is no longer confined to the desktop but reaches into a complex networked world

Humans demonstrate a remarkable ability to generate accurate and appropriate motor behavior under many different and often uncertain environmental conditions. In this paper, we propose a modular approach to such motor learning and control. We review the behavioral evidence and benefits

supporting, but automatic, role. A significant human skill is learning to suppress the overriding contribution of the environment to conceptualization, thereby allowing memory to guide conceptualization. The effort used in suppressing input from the environment pays off by allowing prediction, recollective