Over the last 50 years, American attitudes toward rural areas have shifted from pride and concern to indifference and ultimately neglect. This shift in attitudes has accompanied the decline in rural population. The media tend to portray rural areas in extremes, depicting either poverty, neglect, and despair, or breath-taking scenery and an idyllic…

The development and contributions of Professor Ruth Eckert are presented in this autobiographical essay. Focus is on higher education as a field of graduate study and changes in higher education throughout this century. The author's experiences are set in the context of wider happenings in higher education. (Author/JMD)

Transitions in the social and economic circumstances of Western postsecondary education are: changing numbers of students and jobs; the shift from elite values to educational goals that promote equality; the growing significance of the school government relationship; and stability rather than expansion. (JMD)

College students were trained on a hierarchical mapping technique designed to facilitate prose processing. The students studied a geology passage and five days later were given four types of tests. The treatment group significantly outperformed a control group; the major differences were attributable to concept cloze and essay exams. (Author/RD)

Teachers read and rated a description of either a male or female student who demonstrated either masculine or feminine sex role behavior, and whose major course of study was either English or physics. Student sex role influenced both teachers' perceptions of students and their evaluation of student writing. (Author/RD)

The various employment opportunities for the chemistry college graduate are given. Trends show that industry is seeking out rather highly trained graduates. Desirable types of training are suggested. (SA)

The similarity of information provided by direct and indirect methods of writing assessment was investigated using 219 tenth graders. A resulting cognitive model of writing skills indicates that practitioners interested in reliably measuring all aspects of the proposed writing process continuum use both direct and indirect methods. (TJH)

Reports on a study of two introductory sociology courses to determine whether informal writing assignments can aid learning. Finds that requiring students to keep journals did not significantly improve performance on essay tests. Asserts that teachers may be justified in requiring attendance as a strategy for increased learning. (CFR)

Results from a performance assessment in which 68 high school students wrote essays support the use of latent variable modeling for estimating reliability, concurrent validity, and generalizability of a scoring rubric. The latent variable modeling approach overcomes the limitations of certain conventional statistical techniques in handling…

Uses handwriting samples of 12 undergraduates to explore whether teachers give higher marks to students' work in good handwriting and whether the students' gender may be surmised by their handwriting. Results show grading is not influenced by handwriting quality and finds no effect of gender attribution on grades assigned. (NL)

Compares the quality and syntactic complexity of 2 types of essays written by 44 college freshmen in a basic writing course. Essays dealing with group-phenomenon events (intensification) had more words per clause, but received lower quality scores than essays dealing with individually experienced events (initiation). (PAA)

Reports an experiment in collaborative essay testing in a college course, finding some improvement in achievement, significant reduction in test anxiety, and student engagement in reflective thinking similar to metacognition. In addition, partners generally participated equally in test preparation and content. Suggestions are made for implementing…

Examined feasibility of using observation, interviews, focus groups, questionnaires, checklists, essay writing, drawing, ranking, activities mapping, and participatory rural appraisal with disadvantaged children. Feedback was provided by children from a capacity-building program on child-centered research, psychologists, and program trainees.…

Reports on a comparative assessment of a multimedia learning environment based on a guided discovery approach called CORE (Concept Object Refinement Expression) with two control conditions, lecture and electronic book, in an undergraduate radiography course. Discusses results of qualitative and quantitative measures of effectiveness, pretests and…

To test how to achieve a reliable score on an essay test, based on judgments of specific criteria such as grammatical accuracy or topic relevance, a workshop was conducted on interrater reliability at a teacher educators conference in South Africa. Experienced English teacher educators assessed two essay protocols. Results showed substantial…