Reporting on the construction and validation of instruments for the evaluation of students in the first stages of reading and spelling instruction, this paper first discusses how teachers themselves can determine a student's learning progress with the help of evaluation instruments. Distinguishing between formative evaluation and diagnostic…

The school seeks to enable its students to understand and cope with the maladies of the times, to define and clarify the values and principles that should guide action, and to develop personal behavior consistent with these values and principles. These goals can best be attained through systematic instruction in critical thinking, for these skills…

A group of 144 kindergarten and third grade students heard stories in which the information necessary to infer the protagonist's motives was varied as to its form and location in a story sequence. In all story variations, the semantic content of the information was held constant. All children completed three tasks: a moral judgment concerning the…

This paper outlines two alternate ways in which concepts are acquired, known as "top down" and "bottom up". "Bottom up" refers to learning the members of a category and then extracting their similarities or differences, the rule or criterial attributes used to make the categorization. In the "top down"…

A persistent problem in aptitude-treatment interaction (ATI) research has been the need for a better conceptualization of instructional treatments. The concerns are important in the analysis of instructional treatments: the importance of considering the psychological processes called upon by the instructional treatment, and the ecological validity…

This abstract bibliography cites recent ERIC documents and journal articles concerning the differentiated functioning of the brain hemispheres. Entries include resumes from Resources in Education (RIE), October 1973 through December 1977, and citations from Current Index to Journals in Education (CIJE), November 1974 through December 1977.…

Investigated was the relationship between proportional thinking and students' ability to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of concepts related to simple machines, structure of matter, and equivalent fractions. The study involved a random sample of 136 ninth-grade physical science students. Each student's proportional reasoning skills were…

A "release from proactive inhibition (PI) task" method examines the masculine-feminine connotation of a word as an attribute of encoding in memory. Male (N=45) and female (N=61) subjects were given four trials, each trial consisting of three occupations with all masculine or all feminine connotations, a subtraction task, and a recall…

This project explores the factors influencing the learning of classical mechanics, with an ultimate goal in improving instruction. Twelve academically gifted seventh and eighth graders were interviewed to test their previous perceptions about objects in free fall. They were then observed as they used physics laboratory apparatus and computer…

In this paper, the replication process is explored in an attempt to answer the question of which school resources help the learning of junior high school age students. In order to test a theory derived from data on 553 eighth grade students from 42 Philadelphia schools, three forms of replication are used, examining: (1) a larger, much less…

Much research in the area of person perception has dealt with the problem of how people organize information about other people, including how familiarity mediates the cognitive organization of person information. One multi-operational investigation found that information sets about familiar people, as opposed to unfamiliar people, resulted in the…

THE FIRST ESSAY IN THIS MEMORIAL ANTHOLOGY ASSERTS THAT CORRESPONDENCE COURSES CONCEIVED IN A MATURE, REALISTIC SPIRIT CAN MAKE A UNIQUE CONTRIBUTION TO LIBERAL ADULT EDUCATION. IN THE NEXT, A NEED IS SEEN TO REASSESS ADMINISTRATIVE POLICIES AND TO MAKE RADICAL CHANGES IN KEEPING WITH CURRENT DEMANDS AND RESOURCES. ANOTHER AUTHOR REVIEWS THE…

TESTS WERE CONDUCTED TO FIND THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE CHILD WHO FEELS THAT HIS ACHIEVEMENT IS A RESULT OF INTERNAL FACTORS AND THE CHILD WHO FEELS THAT HIS ACHIEVEMENT OR LACK OF IT IS A RESULT OF EXTERNAL FACTORS. INTERVIEWS, TESTS, AND OBSERVATIONS PROVIDED DATA FOR THE SUGGESTED RELATIONSHIPS. CHILDREN WHO FEEL ACHIEVEMENT TO BE A RESULT OF…

THE VALUE OF A NEW PROCEDURE FOR ASSESSING VERBAL PERFORMANCES OF SUPERIOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS WAS STUDIED. THE INSTRUMENT CONSISTED OF TWO PARTS. IN PART A, THE STUDENT WAS GIVEN AN ANALOGY AND ASKED TO IDENTIFY THE MOST LOGICAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE TWO ELEMENTS IN IT. HE WAS THEN ASKED TO WRITE A DESCRIPTION OF THE RELATIONSHIP IDENTIFIED.…

An English teacher conducting research for a masters degree participated in a high school chemistry class and organized student journal writing in that class so that she could observe the effects of writing as a learning process. Based on the "thinkbook" writing that she and other classmembers did, especially two students who served as…