The content characteristics of the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) are examined from a communicative viewpoint, based on current theory in applied linguistics and language proficiency assessment. The study employed a four-part operational framework. The first component analyzed the communicative characteristics of a language…

America's tax-supported colleges and universities are currently enmeshed in a crisis. Legislatures are demanding more productivity--as measured by accelerated graduation rates--while students, for a whole host of reasons, are not progressing through their course work as quickly as they once did. Completing a degree in four years is now rare, and…

Reading selections from six Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SAT) administered from 1947 to 1975 were analyzed to determine whether a decrease in the difficulty level of elementary and secondary textbooks, workbooks, and teachers' guides corresponded with the SAT score decline. Various indices of reading difficulty and challenge were used. Readability…

After examining the decline in average scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) from 1963 to the present, it has been suggested that, although SAT scores continue to contribute to effective prediction of college grades, the test may have been overtaken by changes in high school programs that have made the test increasingly less related to the…

Children in school cooperate in the evaluation of their products and activities by teachers and other students by calling attention to these products and activities with various language strategies. The requests that someone notice something and/or praise it are the data base for this study. The unmarked speech act for this request type is in the…

This study addressed the question: Why do parochial school students in Rhode Island tend to perform better than public school students in relation to national norms on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS)? Data for examination of school setting and population factors were collected from interviews with teachers and administrators, a short…

During the 1976-77 school year members of the Cooperative Research Endeavors in Education for the Deaf (CREED VII) project conducted a survey and analysis of the situation of Hispanic hearing impaired children in New York City. The demographic profile of this population, home background and language environment, the school environment, cultural…

Supporting performance objective 28 of the V-TECS (Vocational-Technical Education Consortium of States) Secretarial Catalog, both a set of student materials and an instructor's manual on preparing a payroll register, employee earnings' records, and paychecks are included in this packet, which is one in a series. The student materials include a…

The paper discusses high school students' attitudes towards teachers' verbal questioning behavior and assesses the relevance of students' preferences to test score gains. Data were sought for several questions. What cognitive levels of teacher verbal questioning behavior do social studies students prefer? What is the relationship between students'…

The relative development of Piagetian concrete logical operational abilities was investigated in Mexican American and Anglo American children. Performance was assessed on eight classification tasks and three forms of transitivity, measuring seriation skills. One phase of the study compared the performances of 30 Anglo and 30 Mexican American…

The relationship between class size and students' evaluations was examined in two experiments conducted at a public and a private university. Results indicated that the relationship between course enrollment and students' evaluations--with the exception of the quality of Group Interaction factor score--tended to be small, with both very small and…

An Illinois project identified employer perceptions of vocational education graduates' job holding and success problems and needs and prepared instructional units to remediate these problems. An employer job survey was disseminated to businesses and industries who rated young adults entering the job market on non-skill related job performance…

Aspects of faculty evaluation that directly affect employment decisions are considered to assist faculty members, and especially faculty leaders. Advantages and disadvantages of the following five methods of evaluating faculty are examined: self-evaluation, student rating, administrator observation and visitation, colleague review, and evidence of…

Strategies, methods, and techniques for improving college instruction are offered in this handbook. Units include: Pre-instructional Activities; Methods and Techniques: Focus on the Individual and the Small Group; Methods and Techniques: Focus on the Large Group; Methods and Techniques: Focus on Affective Learning; Assessment Techniques; and…

Presenting a set of guidelines for grades K-1, this teacher's manual is one in a set of three competency rating scales which provide guidelines for the infusion of career guidance concepts into the elementary school curriculum. These rating scales were developed by the Georgia Comprehensive Career Guidance Project (Final Report, CE 018 130) which…