This book provides the motor development knowledge base and program planning procedures for developing the elementary physical education program. Part one is an overview of the motor development knowledge base and includes chapters on growth, how exercise affects children, motor skill development, how children learn motor skills, and psychosocial…

To determine the views of evaluation held by educators in Maryland, 115 secondary teachers and 21 administrators in 6 Maryland school districts responded to a 26-item research-designed questionnaire. The questionnaire assessed the primary purposes of evaluation, the procedures used in the subjects' school systems, and the perceived strengths and…

This study introduces a novel methodology for examining affective experiences in the classroom. The general procedure is to make auditory and visual recordings of a particular child during a normal classroom period. That child is then immediately taken from the class and placed in a private room where the recordings are replayed. The student is…

Teacher evaluation is required before, during, and immediately after preservice education to insure a high level of teacher accountability. Personal motivation must be understood before one chooses the profession. Admission criteria to teacher preparation programs must be strengthened so that only proper candidates are selected. Professional…

Attentional processes are said to be central to children's academic learning, yet theories of attention may not be useful in defining and measuring such learning. A formal survey of 35 preschool teachers indicated that teacher definitions were either vague and intuitive, based on many observable child behaviors (like eye orientation and being…

The quality of life of nursing home residents may be enhanced by providing them with opportunities to participate in social activities involving different age groups and community-dwelling age peers. To obtain descriptive data, and to investigate the relationships between patterns of social interaction and subject characteristics, time-sampled…

Articles and essays in this journal issue focus on explaining ethnographic (observation taking into account socioeconomic and cultural factors) research procedures and showing how this methodology can be applied to English classes and reported in ways useful to teachers. The first article, by Paul Diesing, provides background on ethnography. The…

Twelve day care centers in a Swedish commune were systematically observed. Centers were selected on the basis of responses to a questionnaire on attitudes about upbringing which was answered by all the personnel at the 104 day care centers in the commune. Four of the selected centers represented a so-called "present-focused" upbringing…

Generalizability theory, which subsumes classical measurement theory as a special case, provides a general model for estimating the reliability of observational rating data by estimating the variance components of the measurement design. Research data from the "Heart Smart" health intervention program were analyzed as a heuristic tool.…

Early childhood teachers generally have not recognized that assessment is a necessary adjunct to effective teaching, but instead have concluded that it is the concern of special educators or program evaluators. In fact, assessment can play a most important role in planning for and instructing all children. Assessment can be defined as a conscious,…

This study examined the relationship of teaching style orientation, expressed perceptions of the teaching-learning process, actual classroom behavior, and learning styles of six full-time faculty in a dental auxiliary program at a large teaching institution. Data collection instruments used to assess this relationship included the Teaching Style…

The techniques and accompanying problems of collecting data on interventions are explored. As a result of the analyses of two previous studies (Colorado and Kentucky Ethnographic Studies, 1979; and Texas, 1981) a hybrid-method of documenting interventions was developed for use in the Principal-Teacher Interaction Study (PTI). This paper traces the…

The Koppitz Minibattery, that is, the Bender Gestalt Test, the Visual Aural Digit Span Test (VADS), and the Human Figure Drawing (HFD), was adopted and extended for use with middle school pupils (aged 11 to 14). Similarities and differences for older and younger children are described in behavior observation, objective scores and the qualitative…

This report summarizes a five-volume research report on the classroom use and impact of ThinkAbout, an instructional television series designed to strengthen the reasoning skills of fifth and sixth graders and to review and reinforce language arts, mathematics, and study skills. It describes results of a 1979-80 research study which used three…

This report presents the methodology and findings of a national survey of the performance of approximately 9,000 11-year-old children in science. Performance was assessed in six categories: (1) symbolic representation (reading information from graphs, tables, and charts); (2) use of apparatus and measuring instruments; (3) observation; (4)…