Describes the role of judges in Canadian society and the notion of judicial independence that produces complexities for educators. Looks at the characteristics and working environment of judges and describes the part played by the existing agencies involved in judicial education. Suggests potential roles for continuing education units in…

Examined whether reviewers on item-review committees can identify accurately test items that exhibit a variety of flaws. Results with 39 reviewers of a 75-item test show that reviewers exhibit fairly high accuracy rates overall, with statistically significant differences in judgmental accuracy among reviewers. (SLD)

Reviews key cases concerning First Amendment rights in education handed down by courts in 1997. Cases touched on religious freedom, computer speech, speech by faculty on issues of public concern, and official prayer at public colleges and universities. (EV)

The judging philosophy form has been in use at the CEDA National Tournament since 1987, and its use at the NDT has been a mainstay for quite some time. The judging philosophy statement is a document listing a series of topic areas or common issues on which the prospective judge is to elaborate so his or her views will be known to the debate…

If the forensics community has real choice between debate formats, there must be distinctions that justify the existence of each respective style or organization. While such differences can exist at any one of a number of levels, this paper examines differences in adjudicating in both parliamentary and team policy debate, generally known as CEDA…

The delivery of an argument in debate has been clearly shown to be important in facilitating the changing of attitudes favorably toward a message, in enhancing understanding of the material, and in increasing the speaker's ethos. Despite its importance, however, delivery has become dead as a communication concept in debate and is no longer a…

Examining the role of the debate judge reveals many differences between the Cross Examination Debate Association (CEDA) and National Debate Tournament (NDT). One area in which CEDA differs is that of judge qualifications. At present CEDA is moving towards using more lay judges, while NDT has more strict requirements. It would be interesting to use…

Policy debate as an activity should be maintained but must be invigorated. Some reasons to save policy debate are (1) the benefit to large numbers of students who might otherwise fail to debate given the increased difficulty associated with learning how to play the game; (2) the shrinking size of policy tournaments, which makes it easier for…

Although a good deal of the controversy over debate strategy versus substance has been on the construction of both affirmative and negative cases, the most widespread concern is with the use of the "spread." Debate scholars argue that the spread can be misused in two somewhat similar ways. The strategic spread, in which a large number of…

The most common criticism of CEDA (Cross Examination Debate Association) debate tournaments voiced by coaches and students alike centers on the quality of judging. If the debater is completely unaware of the qualifications or credentials of the critic, he or she will be unable to fulfill the judge's expectations. Debates are then lost not on…

The manual provides almost all necessary materials for the successful implementation of a Highway Safety Workshop, designed around a developmental sequence which is basic to the success of the workshop. The major activities of the workshop center around three exercises-the first for small group discussion consisting of questions relating to…

The manual contains all the reference manterials to be used by participants in the Highway Safety Workshop. The materials comprise questions and topics for discussion, abstracts of literature related to these topics, and a bibliography. (SA)

Reports on the applications of psycholinguistic principles to the formulations of jury charges in criminal trials in British Columbia. These principles were applied to standardize jury instructions both from the point of view of the legal information conveyed as well as from the sentence and discourse processing done by the jury. (SED)

In judgmental standard setting experiments, it may be difficult to specify subjective probabilities that adequately take the properties of the items into account. As a result, these probabilities are not consistent with each other in the sense that they do not refer to the same borderline level of performance. Methods to check standard setting…

Points out that Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan's invocation of A. Meiklejohn's theory in the case of the "New York Times v. Sullivan" has turned out to be largely in vain as a means of protecting "cherished values encased in the First Amendment." (FL)