Jeffrey K Smith

• AB PHD
• Head of Faculty at University of Otago

Introduction: This study examined the extent to which a preadmission health science program and demographic variables predicted academic performance throughout an undergraduate pharmacy degree (BPharm) program. Methods: A longitudinal, multi-cohort study was undertaken of 557 students admitted to the University of Otago School of Pharmacy BPharm...

We argue that the future of creativity research should focus on the dual goals of the development of individuals with great creative genius as well as the enhancement of creative activity in society in general. To achieve these goals, we need basic research that will help us better understand the fundamental nature of creativity. We describe an app...

This study explored how different presentations of an object in deep space affect understanding, engagement, and aesthetic appreciation. A total of n = 2,502 respondents to an online survey were randomly assigned to one of 11 versions of Cassiopeia A, comprising 6 images and 5 videos ranging from 3s to approximately 1min. Participants responded to...

What is creativity? This chapter explores various definitions of creativity that have been proposed since the inception of creativity research, along with models and measures of the creative process. Classical approaches to creativity focus on what are known as two-criterion and three-criterion models. All models include some variation of novelty a...

This study extended research on the development of explanatory labels for astronomical images for the non-expert lay public. The research questions addressed how labels with leading questions/metaphors and relevance to everyday life affect comprehension of the intended message for deep space images, the desire to learn more, and the aesthetic appre...

This study extended research on the development of explanatory labels for astronomical images for the non-expert lay public. The research questions addressed how labels with leading questions/metaphors and relevance to everyday life affect comprehension of the intended message for deep space images, the desire to learn more, and the aesthetic appre...

Grading refers to the symbols assigned to individual pieces of student work or to composite measures of student performance on report cards. This review of over 100 years of research on grading considers five types of studies: (a) early studies of the reliability of grades, (b) quantitative studies of the composition of K–12 report card grades, (c)...

Presents an obituary for David Wildon Carr, who passed away on January 31, 2016. David saw himself as a librarian, a museologist, but first and foremost, a teacher. Perhaps more than anything else, David Carr was thoughtful. Full of thoughts. Thoughts about museums and libraries, botanic gardens, historical sites, anywhere where people might go to...

This book is the first book to explore assessment issues and opportunities occurring due to the real world of human, cultural, historical, and societal influences upon assessment practices, policies, and statistical modeling. With chapters written by experts in the field, the book engages with numerous forms of assessment: from classroom-level form...

New Zealand officially provides free education to domestic students between the years of 5–19 in state and state-integrated schools, but the schools can legally require families to provide school uniforms and stationery, and examination fees apply at the upper secondary-school level. State-integrated schools can also charge attendance dues to cover...

A study conducted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art 15 years ago found that the mean amount of time visitors spent looking at great works of art was 27.2 s, with the median at 17.0 s and the mode at 10.0 s (J. K. Smith & Smith, 2001). The study presented here aimed to revisit that study at The Art Institute of Chicago and expand on it by including...

How can we best communicate to museum visitors the science that underlies the incredible images of space that are generated through the data collected from satellites and observatories? The Aesthetics and Astronomy Group, a collection of astrophysicists, space image developers, science communication experts, and research psychologists, has studied...

The psychology of aesthetics and the arts is dedicated to the study of our experiences of the visual arts, music, literature, film, performances, architecture and design; our experiences of beauty and ugliness our preferences and dislikes and our everyday perceptions of things in our world. The Cambridge Handbook of the Psychology of Aesthetics and...

Affordances of contemporary communications technology challenge the unquestioned assumptions and rationale of lectures. Furthermore, as students have changed their patterns of engagement with learning, universities have begun to reconsider their tradition of offering students lectures. These circumstances have prompted a group of teachers in one de...

Reviews the book, Creativity and Crime: A Psychological Analysis by David H. Cropley and Arthur J. Cropley (see record 2013-34554-000). What does the intersection of creativity and crime look like? And what can a serious look at either tell us about the other? That is what this exceptional piece of scholarship is about. The Cropleys cover a remarka...

In the introduction to this volume, we provided the following definition “The psychology of aesthetics and the arts is the study of our interactions with artworks our reactions to paintings, literature, poetry, music, movies and performances our experiences of beauty and ugliness our preferences and dislikes and our everyday perceptions of things i...

Each year approximately 5 million individuals visit The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. They gaze upon works of artistic genius from all over the world and from four millennia. At the same time, about 500 people visit the Waikouaiti Coast Heritage Centre in the South Island of New Zealand. They gaze upon firemen’s helmets, Māori artifa...

The current study examined efficient modes for providing standardized feedback to improve performance on an assignment for a second year college class involving writing a brief research proposal. Two forms of standardized feedback (detailed rubric and proposal exemplars) were utilized is an experimental design with undergraduate students (N = 100)...

Modern society has led many people to become consumers of data unlike previous generations. How this shift in the way information is communicated and received - including in areas of science - and affects perception and comprehension is still an open question. This study examined one aspect of this digital age: perceptions of astronomical images an...

Classroom assessment, in particular formative assessment, frequently involves the development of rich tasks to engage students. This requires careful attention to what is required of students, the affective responses of students to the tasks and how task performance informs learning and instruction. This chapter examines how to develop effective as...

Is the psychology of aesthetics, creativity, and the arts merely a convenient concatenation of vaguely related topics within psychology, or is there actually a psychology of aesthetics, creativity, and the arts that should capture the attention of members of Division 10 of APA? The intersection of creativity, art, and aesthetics is explored in this...

Comments on the original article by Matthew Makel (see record 2014-06823-002) which takes on the laudable task of assessing the state of scientific progress in psychology and having found it wanting, of suggesting what we might do to enhance the enterprise. Makel focuses on the problems of replication, researchers changing their hypotheses to fit t...

Introduces the articles in the present issue of Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts . This issue continues our mission of publishing an outstanding and diverse array of articles. We open the issue with an article by Baoguo Shi, Meihua Qian, Yongi Lu, Jonathan A. Plucker, and Chongde Lin that examines how children’s migration patterns...

Using data from New Zealand's National Education Monitoring Project, a light sampling, low stakes performance based national school assessment program, reading self-efficacy, reading enjoyment, and reading achievement were examined in samples of 8 and 12year old children. Sample sizes were n=480 for each group. While reading achievement increased s...

The characteristics of performance tasks that make them appealing to students in a low-stakes environment were investigated with data from the National Education Monitoring Project (NEMP) of New Zealand. Random samples of Year 4 (8-year-old) and Year 8 (12-year-old) students were assessed using a set of performance tasks in the areas of mathematics...

The experiences and adjustments of students enrolled in Health Science First Year (HSFY) at the University of Otago (Dunedin, New Zealand) were explored to understand students' response to competition. The paper highlights the expressions of past and present HSFY students' impressions of the programme, their experiences, coping strategies and the l...

Every year, hundreds of astronomical images are released to the public via the efforts of professional education and public outreach (EPO) specialists, as well as from scientists themselves and amateur astronomers. Each of these images represents a variety of decisions from the individual or team that assembled it. These choices include cropping, c...

Every year hundreds of astronomical images are released to the general public from the many telescopes both on the ground and in space that observe the Universe. These images cover both data gathered at visible wavelengths and other phenomena at wavelengths that cannot be detected by the human eye, so that the entire electromagnetic spectrum is rep...

We continue to be impressed by the imagination, ingenuity, and rigor of the submissions to Psychology of aesthetics, creativity and the arts. Once again, our authors bring to you the vibrancy, diversity, and depth of our field. We think it’s a great issue and we hope that you will think so as well. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights...

Some 400 years after Galileo, modern telescopes have enabled humanity to "see" what the natural eye cannot. Astronomical images today contain information about incredibly large objects located across vast distances and reveal information found in "invisible" radiation ranging from radio waves to X-rays. The current generation of telescopes has crea...

Astronomy is considered by many to be one of the most visual of the sciences. Most people have some experience with visually processing and reacting to astronomical information, beginning with gazing at the night sky. Today, modern astronomy and astrophysics extend far beyond what is detectable with the human eye. Researchers explore the Universe t...

Limited research suggests that micronutrient supplementation may have a positive effect on the academic performance and behavior of school-aged children. To determine the effect of multivitamin/mineral supplementation on academic performance, students in grades three through six (approximate age range=8 to 12 years old) were recruited from 37 paroc...

During Spring 1997 we experimented with a research method combining quantitative and qualitative approaches to documenting visitor experiences in The Glory of Byzantium, a special exhibition of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In addition to using standard demographic and behavior surveys, a small team of researchers and volunteers gathered informat...

The editors introduce the articles in the current issue of Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. Topics covered by these articles include (1) social comparison and the creation of works of art, (2) what makes something confusing, (3) why found objects are intriguing, (4) a possible explanation of artists' drawing ability, (5) cultural...

The editors acknowledge the journal's reviewers, and give a brief synopsis of the articles in the current issue. Topics covered include the relationship between creativity and mental illness, art students who feel they do not draw well, the music we love and the music we hate, the ability of music to induce happy or sad moods, and the effects of in...

Aesthetics is the study of how human beings react in sensory and emotional fashion to the things we encounter in life, especially as being appealing or not appealing. Is a person beautiful? Is this dessert delicious? Is that work of art particularly moving? Researchers who study taste or beauty in humans are engaged in work in aesthetics, but in re...

Kahneman and Tversky's (1979, 2000; Tversky & Kahneman, 1981) work in decision-making was applied to student preferences for grading practices. Undergraduate psychology students (n=240) were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 framing conditions related to how a university course might be graded: a 100 point system, a percentage system, and an open point s...

The effects of feedback on performance and factors associated with it were examined in a large introductory psychology course. The experiment involved college students (N = 464) working on an essay examination under 3 conditions: no feedback, detailed feedback that was perceived by participants to be provided by the course instructor, and detailed...

The current study examined students’ perceptions of the effects of different forms of instructional feedback on their performance, motivation, and emotion. Forty-nine students attending an eastern US university participated in focus group discussions. The groups explored students’ reactions to grades, praise, and computer versus instructor provided...

This editorial introduces the current issue of Psychology, Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. The issue begins with a picture of a building designed by the great Frank Gehry. Once inside, you will find a smorgasbord of insightful and thought-provoking work. This work includes a piece by the legendary Jerome Singer followed by a study by Anemone...

Examined the impact of adult attachment style on overall psychosocial adjustment among people with physical disabilities. 100 individuals with chronic, non-progressive physical disabilities living in the community. Adult attachment style, self-esteem, social integration and life satisfaction. Participants with physical disabilities did not differ f...

Introduces the articles appearing in this issue of Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. Of particular interest in this issue are the breadth and the rigor of the methodology that underlie the substantive and theoretical issues addressed in the work. The issue begins with an article from Dean Keith Simonton, who looks at the idea of w...

Presents a brief synopsis of each of the articles in the current issue of Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

We hope you enjoy this Special Issue of Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts featuring new scholars in the field. Our instructions to the authors were intentionally vague; we invited them to write a brief article that addressed their research or their thoughts on where the field is headed. What we received are 13 outstanding and thoug...

This issue focuses on research on the arts, in particular music and movies. Topics covered by the articles include different types of reviews and ratings as they relate to eventual movie success, linguistical analyses of the songs of the Beatles, and nostalgia in song lyrics. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

Reviews the book, Language, consciousness, culture: Essays on mental structure by Ray Jackendoff (see record 2007-00633-000 ). In this book, the author attempts to explore human nature by looking at the mental structures that humans use to understand and make their way in the world. He is especially interested in examining the essential issues of s...

This experiment involved college students (N = 464) working on an authentic learning task (writing an essay) under 3 conditions: no feedback, detailed feedback (perceived by participants to be provided by the course instructor), and detailed feedback (perceived by participants to be computer generated). Additionally, conditions were crossed with 2...

Presents issue highlights which includes the first debate in the journal's history. Several commentaries are presented in response to the target article "Assessing creativity with divergent thinking tasks: Exploring the reliability and validity of new subjective scoring methods," by Paul J. Silvia, Beate P. Winterstein, John T. Willse, Christopher...

The structure of children's responses to art and efforts in making art were examined on a random sample of New Zealand schoolchildren, ages 8-9 and 12-13. Participants completed a set of 6 performance assessment tasks in aesthetic perception and artistic production. Factor analysis and multivariate analysis of variance were used to investigate the...

This cross-sectional study evaluated diet quality and weight status in 248 randomly selected low-income urban children, aged 7 to 13 years, who were participating in a larger study on the effectiveness of multivitamin supplementation on school performance. Food frequency questionnaires were used to determine intake of total calories and food groups...

Reviews the film, Out of the Blue directed by Robert Sarkies (2006). According to Smith, Aramoana is a small seaside village about 10 miles north of the city of Dunedin, on the South Island of New Zealand. On November 13th and 14th, 1990, David Gray, a resident of the village, shot and killed 12 of his neighbors, including a number of children, and...

Objective: To examine the relationship between adult attachment style and physical disability in intimate romantic relationships. Method: Participants were 50 individuals with adult-onset spinal cord injuries (SCI) and 50 individuals with congenital disabilities (CON) living in the community. The main outcome measures were adult attachment style an...

Reviews the book, Intelligence, Destiny and Education: The Ideological Roots of Intelligence Testing by John White (see record 2006-10972-000 ). In this book, White tells us that Puritanism is not only partly responsible for the development of modern intelligence theory; according to White, it also is at least somewhat to blame that you had to stud...

We could not imagine a more appropriate inauguration of the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts (PACA) going to four issues per year than with a special issue honoring the life and work of the great aesthetician and psychologist, Rudolf Arnheim. PACA is off to a great start. With this move to four issues per year, we are restarting o...

This study examined whether the presence of a label and the length of viewing time affect the perception of art. Participants were 152 undergraduate students at an urban university in central New Jersey. A computer program randomly assigned participants to viewing 4 paintings under a label or no label condition and a 1-s, 5-s, 30-s, or 60-s time co...

Aesthetic fluency is the knowledge base concerning art that facilitates aesthetic experience in individuals. It can be acquired through direct instruction, but it can also be learned through experience. This experience occurs primarily in art museums, but it also occurs by reading books, visiting galleries, and on the Internet. We liken aesthetic f...

It is argued that classroom assessment evolves from a different set of issues and demands from more traditional measurement concerns and that approaches to reliability developed from traditional concerns are not appropriate for most classroom settings. The assessment and grading issues for high school instruction are examined from the perspective o...

Competency examinations in a variety of domains require setting a minimum standard of performance. This study examines the issue of whether judges using the two most popular methods for setting cut scores (Angoff and Nedelsky methods) use different sources of information when making their judgments. Thirty-one judges were assigned randomly to the t...

The relations between consequence of test scores and motivation, anxiety, and test performance were studied with 112 persons in four undergraduate educational psychology courses. Students were given two versions of an hourly course examination that varied in consequence, with one counting for part of their grade and the other not counting. Each stu...

Conventional wisdom among museum professionals is that art museum visitors do not spend much time viewing works of art. The purpose of this study was to empirically investigate that question as well as to look at the relationship that age, gender, and group size have on viewing times. Visitors to The Metropolitan Museum of Art were observed as they...

The comparability of viewers' responses to slide-projected and computer-generated images of nine paintings by renowned artists to those obtained from individuals experiencing the originals in the galleries of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art was investigated. The influence of training in the visual arts upon evaluative judgments made under t...

Recently, environmental historians have called for histories of the environmental damage caused by chemical companies in the era before strict federal regulation, which began in the late 1960s. This article examines how chemical companies, pollution experts, and government agencies defined the problems of pollution and sought remedies for it. With...

ABSTRACTS The purpose of the study was to determine the impact of a literature‐based program integrated into literacy and science instruction on achievement, use of literature, and attitudes toward the literacy and science program. Six third‐grade classes with children from diverse backgrounds ( N = 128) were assigned to one control and two experim...

Visitors to art museums vary on a number of a dimensions related to how they construct their museum experience. The visiting preferences and intentions of a sample of visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art were examined by having them respond to a survey as they entered the Museum. Visitors were presented with a set of nine contrasting statemen...

The relation between characteristics of test takers and characteristics of items was examined in a quasi-experimental study. High-school sophomores and juniors were administered a mathematics exam that was of consequence to the sophomores but not the juniors. The juniors had more mathematics course work as a group but less motivation to perform wel...

The purpose of the study was to determine teacher and child behaviors during story reading and how they are related. The study broadens the view of classroom storybook reading by examining differences across grade levels, specifically, kindergarten through sixth. Data were collected from 146 classrooms in urban and suburban school districts. The ch...

When a student takes a test, his or her performance may be expected to be influenced by the perceived consequence of the test to the student. Motivation, anxiety, and ultimately performance will be affected by what the test means to the student in terms of results. This research investigates the relationships of test consequence, motivation, anxiet...

The authors investigated children's comprehension of stories and their verbal interactions during storybook readings in groups of varying sizes. Adults read storybooks to 27 kinder-garten and first-grade children from five U. S. school districts. Each child heard three stories read in each of three settings: one-to-one, small-group (3 children per...

The present study investigated the effects of a storybook reading program as one means for literacy development with at-risk students in eight Chapter I, extended-day, urban kindergartens. Children in four experimental classes followed a daily program of literature experiences that included reading for pleasure, story retelling, repeated readings o...

The Mantel-Haenszel (MH) chi-square test has been shown to have desirable statistical properties in detecting biased items. However, small sample sizes are still of concern, especially when large differences in ability exist between the focal and reference groups. This is because the accuracy and power of the MH test depends on the range of overlap...

The present study reports the results of an internal consistency analysis of the Goodenough-Harris Draw A Person test (GHDAP). One hundred and fifty children ages 5, 6, 7, and 8 were given the test and scores were analyzed using the KR-20 formula. The results indicate that the 72-item full scales (Draw-A-Man or DAM and Draw-A-Woman or DAW) show goo...

This paper analyzes the net migration rate of the school age population in substate levels (minor civil divisions) between 1960 and 1970. The investigation includes a series of estimation procedures in order to carry out the analyses. The estimation procedures are unbiased techniques (ordinary least squares and maximum R2 improvement), biased techn...

The effect of different pre-administration warm-up activities on the scores from a measure of creative thinking was investigated. Four activities were used: (1) Creative movement, (2) Guided fantasy, (3) Testlike, and (4) Control. Results indicate that the subscores of fluency, elaboration, and originality on the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking...

The Image of Science and Scientists Scale was developed to assess students' attitudes toward science. The instrument items are based on the 1957 summaries presented by Margaret Mead and Rhoda Metraux. The reliability of the instrument, using coefficient alpha, ranged from 0.76 in the pilot to 0.86 in the second phase of the study. Construct validit...

Weber (1977) contends that the use of Rasch analysis, principal components analysis, and classical test analysis shows that an in strument designed to measure a "bilevel dimensionality" in proba bility achievement (Levin, 1975) in fact measures a single latent trait. This article questions that interpretation and the use of Rasch and classical anal...

The Image of Science and Scientists Scale was developed to assess high school students' attitudes toward science as a field of study. Reliability and three types of validity evidence are reported for the scale.

Educators are more interested in instruction and learning than in testing per se. If evaluation, the process of gathering information for instructional improvement, could be accomplished without the quantitative, formal processes of measurement and testing, there would be no need for them. Unfortunately, informal processes are more inefficient, ina...

Many decisions critical to instruction in the classrom are made prior to the beginning of the school day, and, in some cases, prior to the beginning of the school year. The allocation of time to subject areas, the organization of pupils for instructional purposes, and the determination of the content and emphasis of tasks within subject areas are a...