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Although classic models of implementation emphasized the importance of innovation characteristics in their adoption and sustained use, contemporary implementation research and practice have deprioritized these variables. Human-centered design (HCD) is an approach that grounds product development in information collected about the people and settings that will ultimately use those products. HCD has strong roots in psychological theory, but its application is typically limited to the development of digital technologies. HCD is rarely applied to the design of psychosocial innovations — including both service-recipient-facing interventions and implementation strategies — within the applied psychological disciplines. The current paper reviews the psychological origins of HCD and details pathways through which HCD theories and methods can be leveraged to advance the “core tasks” of contemporary implementation research and practice in psychology. These include (1) identification of multilevel implementation determinants through specification of user needs and contexts; (2) tailoring of implementation strategies, such as contextually-driven intervention redesign; and (3) evaluating implementation mechanisms and outcomes, including disentangling how the core HCD focus on usability relates to closely associated implementation variables such as acceptability, feasibility, and appropriateness. Collectively, these applications provide directions through which to leverage the mature field of HCD, maximize psychology’s return on its early theoretical investment, and promote the large-scale impact of findings from across the applied fields of psychology. PUBLIC HEALTH SIGNIFICANCE: Most effective innovations from psychological science are used rarely in routine practice, greatly reducing their public health impact. Human-centered design provides methods and tools through which innovations — and the implementation processes that support them — can be developed or redesigned to ensure public health impact.

Despite the lead article’s title “Validity Concerns and Usefulness of Student Ratings of Instruction” (Greenwald 1997) in the American Psychologist’’s special section on teacher ratings, the papers did not provide direct evidence on “usefulness.” There is no evidence that the use of teacher ratings improves learning in the long run. The papers do not show that the effects would improve the allocation of effort between teaching and research, or that the quality of the educational experience will be better, or that students and faculty will be happier. Given the evidence to date, the case for student ratings is weak. I raise some questions about usefulness, with a particular emphasis on the ratings’ effects on learning. Are teacher ratings related to learning? The correspondence of ratings to learning should be very close, otherwise, it is not clear what will change. When I was involved with worker incentive standards, the prevailing wisdom was that even modest departures from the desired measure created dysfunctional outcomes. Perhaps the most important finding from the special section is that teacher ratings and learning are not closely related. Furthermore, the ratings/learning relationship seems to be based heavily on studies involving rote learning. The studies provide no breakdown of evidence for studies where skill

Commentary on "Publishing Opinions: A Note on the Usefulness of Commentaries" J. Scott Armstrong University of Pennsylvania Christensen-Szalanski and Beach (December 1983) concluded that the attention given to commentaries and replies to articles did not justify the extra space. Here is another way to look at their data. The increase in journal space due to commentaries and replies was 40% in their sample. The "attention" given to the original article plus commentaries plus replies, was, they said, assessed by the number of citations (not counting cross-citations among the commentary and replies). The median of 21 citations for the articles plus commentaries was 91% larger than the median of 11 citations for the articles in the control group. In other words, a 40% increase in space was associated with a 91% increase in citations. Looking at it this way, these data do not argue against the use of commentaries. In the interest of fairness, I must admit to being an editor, a commentator, and the target of commentators on numerous occasions. Although some commentators did not seem to invest much energy, many did. My impression is that the efforts were useful overall. But I am biased. Commentaries may serve the useful function of pointing out errors in a paper—thus leading to fewer citations. From my experience, the commentaries added emphasis and helped in the understanding of important contributions—thus leading to more citations and to classroom use. I agree with Christensen-Szalanski and Beach on the need for guidelines that call for short commentaries. The editor can then relax the requirement for commentators who add data.