This final report presents a summary and second-year findings of a 2-year project designed to measure the effectiveness of microcomputer instruction on reading and mathematics skills, classroom behavior, general cognitive development, and problem-solving ability of 700 disabled students (ages 3-11) enrolled in four special education schools in New…

In an effort to improve students' interests in science and science courses, a study was conducted in Israel to evaluate students' attitudes towards science relative to two chemistry curricula. These curricula were Chemistry for High Schools (CFH), and Chemistry--A Challenge (CAC). The CFH program was mainly designed for science-oriented students…

A computer program for classifying elements of a language corpus for large-scale analysis is discussed. The approach is based on the assumption that there is a natural unit in speech processing and production, called a tone unit. The program "tags" the five grammatical phrase types (verb, adverb, adjective, noun, and prepositional) to…

Technologically Advanced Families (Taffies) were profiled in a study that compared media technologies penetration in North Carolina with national media penetration data. Telephone surveys were conducted in February 1986 by journalism students at the University of North Carolina. Subjects interviewed were 585 North Carolina households to determine…

A study examined the language use of two teachers, one a native, bilingual Cantonese-English speaker and the other a monolingual English-speaker, as they alternated teaching assignments between two first grade classes in a Chinese-English bilingual education program. Teacher-student interaction and the variation in teacher and student language use…

An example of reader, writer, and text transaction and interaction may be seen in a study that examined story grammar and applied propositional analysis, cohesive analysis, and miscue analysis to one reader and one text to determine comprehension. A third grade boy read and then retold the story "The Accident." The miscues were marked,…

This collection contains three studies of the relationship between incentives, learning, and employability. The first study, "Incentives, Learning, and Employability," by John Bishop, models students' choices concerning what to learn and how much effort to spend learning it in terms of the outcome of a comparison of benefits and expected costs and…

Noting that new approaches must be found to decrease the numbers of inmates returning to United States prisons and to provide means for productive changes that will result in self-improvement and new options for inmates both inside and outside the prison after their release, a drama program was established in 1979 for inmates at the Federal…

This document presents a curriculum for high school students designed to help students recognize human needs, develop useful communication skills, improve perception and self-concept, and learn to make rational decisions to improve the quality of life for themselves and for society. The curriculum is organized by instructional objectives. An…

The paper discusses the affective influences on students of problem solving instruction using computers, and the relationship of affective influences to student belief systems. It reviews affective issues and problem solving, and analyzes affect with particular reference to the work of G. Mandler. The paper considers types of congnitive processes,…

This paper reports on the development of three self-efficacy questionnaires for use in studying the interaction effect among students, teachers, and principals within an educational situation. The Student Self-Efficacy Instrument was designed from a widely used questionnaire administered to children, the Intellectual Achievement Responsibility…

A random digit dialing procedure was used to administer a telephone survey to 335 adult residents of Community School District 22 in Brooklyn, New York. An interview schedule was developed to measure respondents' awareness of substance abuse in their neighborhoods and of local facilities for dealing with such problems. Respondents (N=125) whose…

To find out what kinds of information parents regularly get from schools on the progress of their children, the Southwest Regional Laboratory surveyed a sample of public school districts in California, Arizona, and Nevada. Responses were received from 18 school districts ranging in size from fewer than 300 students to more than half a million. The…

Recent research on affective variables and classroom second language learning suggests that: (1) affective variables are context-sensitive in at least two ways; (2) attitudes are contagious, and the general attitude of students can be influenced from various directions; (3) research in pragmatics, discourse analysis, and communicative functions…

A study was conducted to identify and compare the prevalence of communication apprehension among foreign, black, and white students. Data from a survey of basic English and speech classes were used to locate 83 nonapprehensive and 64 apprehensive foreign, black, and white students, who were then identified as low communication apprehensive or high…