This study is an initial investigation of the effects of grade level, item content and type of probe on children's understanding of communicative ineptness. It was hypothesized that children's recognition and avoidance of inept communications would increase as a function of age and that recognition of ineptness would precede the ability to avoid…

Using informal, objectives-based, or linguistic methods, three elementary school teachers and three experienced item writers developed criterion-referenced pretests-posttests to accompany a prose passage. Item difficulites were tabulated on the responses of 364 elementary students. The informal-subjective method, used by many achievement test…

This study investigated the quantitative and qualitative differences in the responses of children aged four, six, and eight to four kinds of questions; cognitive memory, convergent, divergent, and evaluative. The subjects, 48 boys and girls, were from advantaged homes and had attended, or were attending, nursery school. Each subject was shown a…

The hypotheses that interpersonal learning is more effective than individual learning in nonlinear tasks but that students learn relatively less from their teachers when the teachers have to teach a complex nonlinear rule than when they have to teach a simple linear rule was tested in an experiment following the social judgment theory…

The compositions of sixth, tenth, and twelfth grade students were used to determine whether narrations or arguments of high syntactic complexity were rated higher than narrations or arguments of low syntactic complexity. Selection of the compositions was made in pairs--one of high syntactic complexity and one of low syntactic complexity--each…

TRAINING TASKS WERE PRESENTED UNDER LABORATORY CONDITIONS TO NEWLY INDUCTED ARMY BASIC TRAINEES GROUPED BY ARMED FORCES QUALIFICATION TEST (AFQT) SCORES. THE HIGH GROUP (N=52) RANGED IN SCORE FROM 90 TO 99, THE MIDDLE GROUP (N=30) FROM 45 TO 55, AND THE LOW GROUP (N=61) FROM 10 TO 21. TASKS WERE VARIED IN COMPLEXITY INCLUDING SIMPLE AND CHOICE S-R…

One of 52 theoretical papers on school crime and its relation to poverty, this chapter presents an aesthetic theory of vandalism and reports nine original empirical studies that are relevant to the theory. It is proposed that the act of destroying an object is enjoyable because it is, in effect, an aesthetic experience. The essay is divided into…

Latent trait models may offer considerable potential for the improvement of educational measurement practices, but until recently, they have received only limited attention from measurement specialists. This paper provides a brief introduction to latent trait models, and provides test practitioners with a non-technical introduction to the…

Assessment exercises (items) in three different formats--multiple-choice with an "I don't know" (IDK) option, multiple-choice without the IDK, and open-ended--were placed at the beginning, middle and end of 45-minute assessment packages (instruments). A balanced incomplete blocks analysis of variance was computed to determine the biasing…

Before any conclusions can be drawn about the relative complexity of grammatical items, the items should be thoroughly analyzed. For example, learning to use French gender involves much more than learning to recognize formal characteristics which account for gender in nouns; it also requires that semantic gender features be mastered, so that…

A tailored testing model employing the beta distribution, whose mean equals the difficulty of an item and whose variance is approximately equal to the sampling variance of the item difficulty, and employing conditional item difficulties, is proposed. The model provides a procedure by which a minimum number of items of a test, consisting of a set…

Twenty 4-year-old children were randomly assigned to one of two experimental groups or to a control group in an attempt to determine whether or not training of left-right relational concepts would improve (1) the subjects' left-right relational skills and (2) their ability to better perform on tasks of spatial perspective. All children were…

Aphasic (N=15) and non-brain-damaged adults were administered the Nelson Reading Skills Test (NRST). NRST items requiring complex inferences were more difficult than items requiring simple or no inferences. Passage dependency level was higher compared to other tests, suggesting that the NRST more validly measures aphasics' multiple-sentence…

Two "sacred cows" inherent in reading instruction for disabled readers are rejected: Disabled readers must be taught with simple reading materials, and most teaching time must be spent on reading skills. Two case studies illustrate the teaching of decoding skills and "dyad reading" of books selected by the disabled reader.…

This research investigated the effects of a technology based learning program on 219 5th graders' reading and technology skills. Central to the program's design is its capacity to deliver reading materials that are on students' individually differentiated reading levels. That is, on any given day all students in a classroom receive a reading…