Student procrastination in one the most serious drawbacks of self-paced learning. Our study investigated the effectiveness of three types of course contingencies (contracting, doomsday, and doomsday with tokens) designed to reduce student procrastination in a personalized system of instruction (PSI) course. Students participants (N = 610). Student progress was fastest, p < .001, and course completion was most likely, p <.01, in the contracting condition, which was also the most costly in terms of administrative effort.

Women's historical lack of prominence in Western culture has been the subject of much research and debate in recent years. One area of partiuclar concern has been language: the grammatical prescription of masculine words as generic to describe both men and women. In the service of equality between the sexes, it is crucial to demonstrate that "generic" masculine words are indeed interpreted as generic (equally inclusive of women and men) by language users. The research reported here manipulated gender neutrality of language descriptors to determine whether generic masculine nouns, pronouns, and possessive pronominal adjectives function more similarly to gender specific terms or neuter terms. The relative masculinity of responses to these terms was assessed within three different tasks (draw a picture, read an essay, and provide example names). In addition, the relative masculinity/femininity of 10 terms with various intended gender references was empirically assessed. Participants rated each of them using 14 adjectives taken from the Bem Sex Role Inventory. Results support and extend previous research by showing ( I ) that "generic"masculine nouns, pronouns, and adjectives function similarly to gender specific masculine terms and (2) that certain grammatically "neutral" terms are in fact rated as relatively masculine. This evidence demonstrates that the use of "generic" masculine and even other grammatically neutral terms in effect serves to exclude women from the English language. The resulting masculine bias in our language reflects and reinforces the pattern of male dominance in society.Modern English contains a serious ambiguity. Consider the word "man," which can be used t o mean not only one adult male but also a person of unspecified gender or all human beings (both male and female). The different intentions governing the use of this generic masculine noun pose two problems. One is that because of multiple meanings, the communication sender must provide a context to make the intended meaning possible to uncover. But, possible does not mean probable. The other difficulty is that a communication receiver may or may not interpret the word according t o the usage intended by the sender. To put it another way, when I say "man" I might not mean "adult male," but the listener might assume that I do. Just because speakers and writers use a masculine noun or pronoun generically does not imply that listeners and readers interpret it that way.'Requests for reprints should be sent to Prof.

The study of pedestrian locomotion in public environments includes both velocity and trajectory of movement. Within public settings such as shopping malls, pedestrians display economy of movement by minimizing the distance (trajectory) walked to arrive at a destination (Bitgood & Dukes, 2006). Although groups of pedestrians have been found to walk more slowly than individuals (Finnis & Walton, 2008), there has been little systematic investigation of how the size of a group and the presence of accompanying children independently affect pedestrian trajectory and velocity. Five naturalistic observational studies with 1,050 observations were conducted at an enclosed retail shopping mall. Neither the size of groups nor the number of children had a significant effect on trajectory of movement. However, both group size and number of children independently predicted pedestrian velocity. Results have implications for predictions of pedestrian facility throughput.

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