This paper examines the issue of the loss of less competent children from schools as a result of the emphasis upon academic excellence. Studies are cited indicating that more than 90 percent of all secondary principals feel that their schools are improving; yet, as many as 25 percent of all children in a given sixth-grade class will drop out…

The extent to which schooling brings about change in the rank order of students along the hierarchies of intelligence is a pervasive sociological concern. Until quite recently the emerging consensus was that schooling is relatively ineffective in this regard and that intelligence is largely exogenous to the educational process. A study to…

Expectation research has frequently assumed that teachers respond differently to students, based upon their perceptions of student ability. Because general student behavior is correlated with ability, however, it is possible that teachers are responding to differences in behavior rather than ability. A study examined the relationship between…

Examinees (N=1,233) at the Johnson O'Connor Research Foundation (JOCRF) were administered one of three test forms in which only item order differed. The study was undertaken to determine the validity of the assumption underlying item response theory (IRT) that there are fixed item parameters that can predict performance. The Rasch IRT model was…

The Higher Education Learning Package (HELP) program at Sacramento City--an interdisciplinary approach to basic skill development for high-risk, nontraditional students--has four goals: (1) promotion of student retention at the community college through cognitive and attitudinal development, (2) personal development of students through a…

The purpose of the study was to compare college admission decisions concerning handicapped and nonhandicapped applicants with comparable Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores and high school grades (HSG). The study focused on 1,539 handicapped students who applied to 121 institutions that participated in the College Entrance Examination Board's…

Two psychometric approaches for the investigation of item bias were employed to examine the performance of four sociocultural groups on six subtests of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children - Revised (WISC-R). The sample of 950 students was from Pima County, Arizona. One approach involved the comparison of the psychometric indices of…

The organization of social studies classroom communication and the format for presenting such communication were investigated. High school students (n=282) were assigned to groups determined by the possible combinations of lesson organization, also referred to as lesson commonality (high versus medium versus low), method of reading (oral versus…

Preliminary work by Theresa McMillen and George Bodner has shown significant correlations between level of spatial visualization and orientation ability and success in a chemistry course designed for science and engineering majors. This study is an in-depth replication of McMillen's work with approximately 1600 science and engineering majors…

This paper raises a series of questions about the nature of classroom instruction, in general, and about mathematics and reading instruction in the lower elementary school grades, in particular. It focuses on such aspects of the social organization of instruction as (1) the diversity of student populations, (2) the motivating force behind…

The issue of the teaching profession's drawing power was addressed By examining differences between college students who said they were planning to teach and those who selected other careers. The teacher candidate population included all entering freshmen who said they planned to become teachers whether or not they planned to major in education.…

This study focuses on the question of "emotional style," defined as the structure or lack of structure in the interaction between teacher and student. Characteristics of "open" and "structured" teachers and students are defined. It is hypothesized that a matching of teacher and student emotional style will result in…

Declining academic standards are possible consequences of (1) competition for students; (2) federal interference; (3) social pressures. Because it takes only one generation of badly managed education to do irreparable societal damage, the greatest service we can render our young people is to give them dependable standards of achievement.…

This is one of a series of reports summarizing the results of the second mathematics assessment conducted by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Nine, 13- and 17-year-olds were assessed during the 1977-78 school year. The assessment measured achievement in various content areas at four levels of cognitive processes: knowledge,…

This study attempted to establish the relationship of cognitive aptitudes and styles to measures of general and more subtle academic achievement. It was expected that the associations of aptitudes and styles to general measures of achievement would converge to form similar correlational patterns; associations of aptitudes to more subtle measures…