This paper describes the development and evaluation of the WillTry instrument, a psychometric tool designed to measure children's willingness to try fruits and vegetables. WillTry surveys were interviewer-administered to 284 children in an elementary school and summer day camps located in rural Mississippi and Arkansas (United States) communities. Factor analysis was used to determine construct...

We describe a novel parallel randomized search algorithm for two-player games. The algorithm is a randomized version of Korf and Chickering’s best-first search. Randomization both fixes a defect in the original algorithm and introduces significant parallelism. An experimental evaluation demonstrates that the algorithm is efficient (in terms of the number of search-tree vertices that it visits) ...

The Evaluation Self-Efficacy (ESE) scale was designed as an outcome measure for evaluation research courses in social work. A revised version of the Social Cognitive Theory–based ESE (ESE-II) was developed and evaluated in the current study including both new and revised items. The ESE-II was evaluated in a final sample of 168 masters level students using a pretest–posttest design. Exploratory ...

Psychological symptoms are considered as one of the aspects and consequences of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), management of which can precipitate and facilitate the process of recovery. Evaluation of the psychological symptoms can increase awareness of treatment team regarding patients’ mental health, which can be beneficial for designing treatment programs (1). However, time-consuming proces...

The need for orientation is the most prominent contingent condition for agenda-setting effects. It provides a psychological explanation for why people engage in information seeking and why some people are susceptible to agenda-setting effects while others are not. The purpose of this paper is to present the development and empirical validation of a three-dimensional scale of need for orientatio...