Self-evaluation research reveals that individuals are differentially receptive to approval and disapproval from others. To examine how individuals respond to interpersonal evaluation, 96 male and female college students, chronically low or high in social anxiety (shyness), received evaluative information after a successful or unsuccessful outcome…

This study reports on the development of the Dyadic Adjustment Scale, a new measure for assessing the quality of marriage and other similar dyads. This factor analytic study suggests four empirically verified components of dyadic adjustment to be used as subscales (dyadic satisfaction, dyadic cohesion, dyadic consensus and affectional expression).…

The Parent Attitude Research Instrument (PARI) was employed to study the attitudes of 146 mothers of preschool children toward childrearing. Because responses from the sample were not consistent with scales previously reported in the literature, reevaluation of the scales was performed. Reevaluation revealed groupings of clusters were comparable…

Historically pesonality has been predicated on behavioral consistency. To demonstrate the uniqueness of personality using three methods, 23 female college students initially recorded self-descriptive words at the end of each of 23 days. These words were then assigned favorability values from the Adjective Generation Technique norm list. First,…

The focus of this study was on the visual analysis of time series data for evaluating educational programs. Two characteristics of the data--changes in slope and variability--and two characteristics of evaluation--training in data utilization and the use of aimlines/decision rules--were manipulated. A total of 51 students and/or teachers in…

Two methods of 'equating' tests using item response theory (IRT) are compared, one using true scores, the other using the estimated distribution of observed scores. On the data studied, they yield almost indistinguishable results. This is a reassuring result for users of IRT equating methods. (Author)

The head teacher of a child care organization implemented a practicum intervention designed to establish complete and clear procedures, guidelines, and standards of quality for staff members. As a result of the practicum intervention, it was expected that at the end of 10 weeks: (1) the staff at the child care center would support a plan for…

There are two types of errors made in feeling-of-knowing (FOK) studies: a commission error occurs when a subject answers a question incorrectly, and an omission error occurs when a subject fails to provide an answer for a given question. A subject makes a commission error if he or she responds to the following question, "In which city does…

Identifying, acquiring, and developing valid and reliable instruments are major problems facing researchers who study psychosocial drug use and abuse. Much time is often devoted to creating a measuring device when an adequate one already exists, resulting in duplication of effort, considerable waste of resources, and loss of uniform comparability…

Although students quickly form reasonably lasting judgments of their instructors and courses they are also able to alter their judgments as warranted by changing situations. These findings appear to provide support for the validity of student evaluations. (Author/RC)

A discussion of increasing productivity in post secondary education involves the improvement of the assessment of educational outcome with respect to range of attributes measured and reliability and validity, and the improvement of the quality and number of measures used to assess educational outcome. (Author/AM)

Evaluation design is discussed in terms of conditions that an adult education intervention (product, practice) must meet to get Joint Dissemination and Review Panel (JDRP) approval. (Effectiveness, the sole criterion for JDRP approval, must be established by evaluation data adequate to tie the project and desired impact together in a…

A detailed description is provided of the variable school's demographic setting (DB), which is part of the analysis in phase I of the Evaluation of Practices in Individualized Schooling. The variable is defined; the questionnaires on which the variable is based are listed; the procedures used to scale the variable are explained; the distribution…

Expository passages containing either main point inconsistencies, detail inconsistencies, or no inconsistencies were presented sentence by sentence to 90 college students. Subjects read through the passages at their own pace and were encouraged to reread sections of text whenever they wished. As expected, subjects spent more time on sentences…

To make training cost-effective for its small systems customers, Digital Equipment Corporation provides self-paced training packages for several years that can be used by its customers on-site. To control the quality of this training, Digital is now incorporating computer managed instruction (CMI) into some of these packages. This CMI component…