Abstracts of papers presented to the 44th Annual Meeting of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching are arranged according to the topic of the session at which they were presented. Separate sessions were devoted to elementary, secondary, junior high school, and college and university science teaching, with papers on evaluation,…

Previous studies of language have indicated that various qualifier words (e.g., I know that, probably) attached to statements represent differing degrees of belief in the statements. Nine qualifiers were studied which represent 3 degrees of probability and 3 forms of wording: "certainly, it is certain, I know, Probably, it is likely, I believe,…

Reported are the results of an investigation of the child's acquisition of the concept of area measure. To measure this acquisition, four axioms were developed to define the concept of area. A task was developed for each axiom to test operational understanding of the axiom. A test of vocabulary and a conservation of area task were administered to…

This document is a compilation of abstracts of 20 research papers presented at the 51st Annual Meeting of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. Six reports concern methods of instruction, eight investigate patterns of learning, three deal with evaluation of attitudes, and three reports cover tests and test construction. (DT)

Forty-two educable mentally retarded children (21 boys, 21 girls) performed an oddity learning task in one of three conditions: experimenter not present, experimenter present and providing relevant cues (RC), and experimenter present and providing irrelevant cues (IC). The experiment was designed to test J. Turnure's outerdirectedness hypothesis…

The effect of same sex and cross sex experimenters on the attentive behaviors and learning of 64 educable mentally retarded children were examined under two conditions: experimenter not present; and experimenter present and providing cues relevant to task mastery. Female Ss were found to perform significantly better with male experimenters than…

Investigated was the relationship between Science Concept Retention by high school science students six months after completion of a course in BSCS biology, CHEMS chemistry, and PSSC physics with each of the following variables: I.Q., Sex, Science Achievement, Natural Science Development, Reading Comprehension, Quantitative Thinking, Delay…

One hundred seventy-six seventh grade students underwent a recorded interview where each was given a set of computational exercises and asked to say aloud his thinking as he worked them. The most frequently used strategies in computations with whole numbers and fractions are described in detail, an analysis of the nature of wrong answers is…

The existence of inductive and deductive learning styles and their effect on mathematics achievement were investigated. On the basis of achievement scores on two tests, 298 eighth grade students were chosen, stratified by sex and previous mathematics achievement, and randomly assigned to one of four instructional sequences. No significant…

In this experiment two variables relevant to explaining the social support phenomenon were investigated. Response position of the partner (first vs fourth) and contact between partner and S prior to the group situation (contact vs. no contact) were manipulated. Male and female Ss responded to visual, information, and opinion items in a group…

Physical, mental, and socio-cultural variables were associated with performance on the Life-Science Concept Acquisition Test (L-SCAT), developed by the investigator. The usefulness of the variables as predictors of performance on L-SCAT was also investigated. The L-SCAT was administered as a picture-stimulus structured interview to each of 51…

The purpose of the study was to investigate the effects of the presentation mode (vertical, horizontal) and the placeholder position (left, middle, right) of the frames of workbooks upon first and second grade children's ability to solve number sentences as measured by the rate and type of error. Effects over addition and subtraction were also…

The goal of this study was to investigate improvement in the usage of equivalence and order relations under specified instructional conditions. Forty-eight upper middle class kindergarten children were given a 14-session pretreatment designed to define two equivalence and four order relations of length and matching, followed by tests of…

Tested was a method of learning numeration, addition, and subtraction using measuring operations in place of the more usual counting operations. It is claimed that an approach through "units of measurement" to continuous variables is mathematically more powerful than counting, which leads only to nominal and ordinal variables. Twelve children…

THE EFFECTS OF A CONTROLLED THERMAL ENVIRONMENT ON PUPIL LEARNING WERE ANALYZED. APPROXIMATELY 20 MATCHED PAIRS OF FIFTH-GRADE STUDENTS WERE SELECTED. TWO GROUPS WERE USED--ONE FOR AN IDEAL THERMAL ENVIRONMENT AND THE OTHER FOR A DEVIATE THERMAL ENVIRONMENT. THE STUDENTS WERE MATCHED BY INTELLIGENCE TEST SCORES, ACHIEVEMENT TEST RESULTS, SEX, AGE,…