This paper discusses the concept of stress by drawing from social-psychological, occupational, family, and medical perspectives. A model of stress based on an integration of these perspectives is developed and then applied to the family relationship over time. The components of the model consist of: (1) a stressor stimulus, any situation that may…

This document contains three papers from the Methodology Project of the Center for the Study of Evaluation. Methods for characterizing test accuracy are reported in the first two papers. "Bounds on the K Out of N Reliability of a Test, and an Exact Test for Hierarchically Related Items" describes and illustrates how an extension of a…

It has been suggested that a procedure based on the logic of Bayesian probabilities would make it possible to assess individual differences in stereotyping. Given the possible advantages of using the McCauley and Stitt (1978) procedures to measure individual differences, three groups of college students were tested to see if they would use Bayes…

Peak performance in the death crisis as a critical incident of creative response to the awareness of one's own or another person's death is the concern of this report. The topology of peak performance in the death crisis was examined in an investigation of retrospective self-reports of 20 adult respondents and a factor structure of peak…

The first of several planned volumes of Free Response Test Items contains geology questions developed by the Assessment and Evaluation Unit of the New South Wales Department of Education. Two additional geology volumes and biology and chemistry volumes are in preparation. The questions in this volume were written and reviewed by practicing…

Eighteen fourth grade students and twenty sixth grade students participated in a study to determine if there was a significant difference in the quality of written composition among students exposed to the peer editing process as opposed to those exposed to teacher editing. The control group consisted of 8 fourth grade students and 10 sixth grade…

This paper, one of several written for a comprehensive policy study of early childhood education in Illinois, examines and summarizes the literature on the problems of young children in adjusting to starting school full-time and describes the nature and extent of their difficulties in relation to statewide educational policy. The review of studies…

A 328-item checklist, suitable for the self-reporting of responses to any stimulus event, was administered to 107 upper division college students in an attempt to investigate the physiological-cognitive-emotional responses to defense arousing communication and to discover a greater range of the key features of the phenomena of…

Prepared as part of the interdisciplinary Turko-Danish Fairytale Project, this paper describes the design of a study intended to discover: (1) if there are aesthetic principles that are universal and that guide readers' experiences of works of literature; (2) whether the principles are built into people by their cultural, economic, and social…

This paper describes the folkloristic and literary theories centered on the traditional narrative that have a bearing on the Turko-Danish Fairytale Project. These theories were incorporated into the Fairytale Project because traditional prose tales (of which the fairy tale is one of the most prominent forms) are a genre that exists in both oral…

Summaries of the Danish internal reports of the essay studies, the introspection studies, and the literary analyses that are part of the larger interdisciplinary Turko-Danish Fairytale Project concerning the collective versus the individual nature of the response to literature are presented in this report. Various sections of the five papers…

The correlation between risk taking behavior and test results on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) was examined in a group of 47 fourth and fifth grade students identified for a gifted and talented program. The risk-taking check list (DEEP) was developed by the Downington, Pennsylvania Area School District, and includes four…

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 psychology of emotion has been studied primarily from an intrapsychic perspective. A social psychological perspective of emotion can supplement this intrapsychic approach by examining three areas: (1) controlling the emotions of others; (2) controlling the thoughts of others through emotional expression; and (3) emotional congruence, or the…

A wide range of interesting observations of the past decade, which may now cast their shadow as the health communication paradigm of the forthcoming decade, can be clarified and correlated. One example of effective communication therapy was Norman Cousins's hospitalization with the crippling disease, "ankylosing spondylitis." Using large doses of…