A study investigated the relative effects of ownership opportunities and instructional support on high school students' engagement with assigned writing topics. Subjects, 66 eleventh graders enrolled in five United States history classes, experienced three instructional conditions, writing on one of three topics in each one. The instructional…

This pilot study sought to establish validity of a teacher career development model based on results from previous research which had isolated a series of career stages and several characteristics of each stage. The model was constructed to identify characteristics associated with effective and ineffective transfer of knowledge from teacher to…

After a review of the literature on cognitive "cause maps" in organizational decision-making, this study describes a midwestern elementary school from the perspective of individual sensemaking, captured through individual cognitive maps of cause-effect relationships. Data were collected with an adaptation of Bougon's (1983) Self-Q…

Attitude measurement through Likert-type surveys usually provides no opportunity to assess the importance of the statements of the subjects. This study, involving 479 graduate and undergraduate students, examines the question of whether importance and agreement measures have different underlying dimensions, and examines the question of whether the…

The use of factor analysis in examining the dimensionality of language tests is questioned and found to be problematic because it has a number of weak points which make it possible to manipulate results. Some of these weaknesses occur in the examinee selection sample, test selection, and the methods of extraction and rotation chosen. The use of…

This study explores the use of the adjunct question paradigm in self-instruction and distance education materials. The subjects were 187 high school students who read text passages and answered one high level (implication or inference) or low level (verbatim or paraphrase) question. These questions were either inserted in the text or massed at the…

An empirical comparison of the validity of three Likert-type attitude scales measuring fourth to sixth grade students' attitudes toward school integration was conducted. The content-parallel forms differed only in terms of item phrasing and were composed of either all positive, all negative or a mix of items. Different factor solutions underlying…

Sixty high school juniors and seniors participated in an experiment testing the effects of learning strategies on performance. The experiment was run in two identical sessions except for the type of test administered. Information on classifying six types of sailboats was presented through slides and an oral explanation. Subjects were then given a…

A review of the literature reveals that several common characteristics are used to describe battered women, e.g., low self-esteem, passive, guilty, depressed, dependent. To test the accuracy of these descriptions, the 16 PF Personality Inventory was administered to 30 battered women. Analyses confirmed that abused women exhibited significantly…

Described here are methods being worked out, inductively, to convert to quantifiable factors a set of 144 personal interaction variables observed during individual testing of a multi-cultural sample of 50 high school students referred for school problems. Factor analyses of subsets of variables and comparison of correlations among "factor…

Four epistemological belief and two teaching/learning conception dimensions were identified from a questionnaire study of a sample of Hong Kong preservice teacher education students. The epistemological belief dimensions were labelled Innate/Fixed Ability, Learning Effort/Process, Authority/Expert Knowledge and Certainty Knowledge. The somewhat…

Three demographically-based enrollment projections are analyzed in this paper. The first set of projections was prepared by the National Center of Education Statistics (NCES), the second set was estimated by the Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education, and the third set is the work of Allan Cartter. NCES projections cover the…

Research supported by Public Health Research Grant MH-10274-4 from the National Institute of Mental Health.