Learning from examples is a very effective means of initial cognitive skill acquisition. There is an enormous body of research on the specifics of this learning method. This article presents an instructionally oriented theory of example-based learning that integrates theoretical assumptions and findings from three research areas: learning from worked examples, observational learning, and analog...

Academic training leading to prescriptive authority is compared among psychiatric nurse practitioners, physicians, and pharmacologically trained psychologists. Statistics are presented on the relative emphasis that programs serving each discipline place on the preparation of their respective students in academic and clinical content areas that are relevant to the prescribing of psychoactive med...

Today’s hearing aids are frequently fitted using prescriptive formulae. Wearer satisfaction is assumed when the frequency-gain response of the hearing aid matches the target frequency-gain response prescribed by a specific formula. Although this approach simplifies hearing aid fitting, there are several reasons to suspect that this approach may have some shortcomings in ensuring an optimal fit ...

Much of the critical discussion of prescriptive authority for psychologists has focused on the question of whether this is the right direction for the profession. The authors contend that discourse on prescriptive authority should progress to identification of the challenges that lie ahead for psychology as a prescribing profession, with the goal of anticipating and addressing those challenges ...

The Allais Paradox seems as fresh today as it was when first posed some 40 years ago. It has been discussed in the intervening decades and led to many suggestions for modifying, extending or abandoning standard subjective expected utility theory. It has also led to much discussion of the distinction between normative and descriptive models and their rôle in prescriptive decision support. It see...

This paper examines the efficiency and effectiveness of a prescriptive systems development methodology in practice. The UK Government’s mandatory Structured Systems Analysis and Design Method (SSADM) was examined to determine its value to software projects. The evidence was collected from interviews with 17 project managers, discussions with participants on 3 large SSADM projects and from obser...

This article reviews 322 representative contributions to the software process improvement (SPI) literature. The contributions are categorised according to a simple framework: whether their primary goal is prescriptive (to tell SPI professionals what to do), descriptive (to report actual instances of SPI programs in software organisations), or reflective (theoretically analytical). The field is ...