RADFORD -- Radford University is sending 16 graduate students to Colorado to present research results this weekend at the annual Graduate Student Conference in Industrial-Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior (IOOB).

The conference is being held in Denver on March 14-16. Colorado State University's Industrial-Organization Psychology Program is hosting the annual event, which this year is themed "Shifting the Paradigm: Work in the 21st Century."

“IOOB is a great opportunity for the students to present papers, meet other graduate students and attend workshops by some of the biggest names in the field," said Mike Aamodt, coordinator of RU's Industrial-Organization psychology graduate program. "This is an important conference for our program as Industrial-Organization programs are ranked every ten years on the number of presentations made at this conference. In the most recent ranking in 2002, Radford was number one, ranked ahead of all other master’s and doctoral programs in the United States. RU was second in the previous ranking.”

The graduate students’ papers cover a diverse group of topics, Aamodt said. Two of the participating research groups investigated the diversity of group membership to determine whether slightly-heterogeneous groups would perform better than homogeneous or heterogeneous groups. Using innovative samples, Sarah Gilbert, Jenny Lane and Brandon Taube studied the effect of racial composition on performance by National Basketball Association (NBA) teams, and Chrissy Mascio, Rustan Rainey and Michele Zinda studied the effect of gender composition on the performance of families competing on the game show, Family Feud.

Amanda Kaberline, Brandie Tatum and Jason DeBode studied the relationship between cognitive ability and police performance. Their study was motivated by a police department policy set forth in New London, Conn., to not hire officers whose IQ test score was considered too high.

Amanda Shapiro and Jonathan Gallo examined whether the quality of an undergraduate program would increase the ability of undergraduate GPA and GRE scores to predict performance in graduate school. Their results indicate that the quality of the undergraduate university added incremental validity to those scores.

Two other papers describe the results of student service learning projects. Leigh Aldridge and Kristina Hollowell will discuss at the conference the creation of structured interviews for three police departments. Karl Hess, Yu-En Huang and Andrew Luther will compare the results of job analyses conducted for four police departments.