The effects of using newspapers as adjunct materials in education have been documented in recent research. Research results indicate that students are seriously deficient in civic knowledge, and that the newspaper can serve as a bridge between home, school, and community by educating youth about the real world and by influencing their knowledge of…

Teacher ineffectiveness in elementary education is to a large degree due to inadequate preservice education in content areas, and this should be a concern of teacher educators. Statistical data supports this contention, e.g., 275 of 389 students in a mathematics methods course could not work a simple percent problem. Although some professors would…

Questionnaires concerning the users of educational tests were returned by 87 school superintendents in the United States and 228 members of the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME). Most NCME respondents were associated with colleges. The NCME sample represented measurement experts, while the superintendents represented…

An analysis and model of the cognitive processes underlying complex learning situations are presented. A theory is proposed that attempts to specify particular internal knowledge structures generated and modified during instruction, and to use them to explain specific difficulties that the learner experiences and also the overall progress being…

Writers and writing teachers should be wary of depending on readability indexes as indicators of the difficulty of written messages. The Gunning Fog Index and the Damerst Clear Index, two readability formulas, were used to determine the readability of "A Statement of Editorial Policy" and two abstracts appearing in an issue of…

A study of 102 children who failed a preschool hearing screening was undertaken to describe the effectiveness of the followup procedures used in public health screening programs. Parents of the study children were interviewed to ascertain the parents' ability to understand the purpose of the testing and the technician's comments following the…

This paper explores problems inherent in requiring elementary and secondary school social studies teachers to teach economics and be tested with regard to their knowledge of economics without requiring any academic preparation in economic education. Information is based on test scores of 34 elementary and secondary school Texas social studies…

Considerable attention has been devoted in recent years to theories of text comprehension and recall that stress the importance of preexisting knowledge structures or schemata. While the valuable contribution such research has made to the understanding of the reading process and the various disabilities that often attend its acquisition must be…

Socrates' contention was that the sophist misconstrues the sphere of ethics. Although the sophist presents a systematized moral world, no experience is implied. This can be applied to the new professionalism in the teaching of ethics. Loosening the creative tension of perceived responsibility effectively closes down the real moral decision. The…

This paper provides a brief survey of current theory concerning reading comprehension and suggests that the role of the reader's knowledge has been largely neglected. Factors that influence the assessment of information or idea gain are the nature of the learner, the nature of the material, the nature of the purposes for reading, and the means…

The process of acquiring knowledge from texts is considered from two perspectives: the learning of the individual facts in the text, and the integration of the facts into a coherent representation reflecting relations among the facts. The former process is presumed to depend on the linguistics content of the text, while the latter process depends…

To investigate the applicability of schema-theoretic notions to young children's comprehension of textually explicit and inferrable information, slightly above-average second grade readers with strong and weak schemata for knowledge about spiders read a passage about spiders and answered wh-questions tapping both explicitly stated information and…

Data for this study of the relationship between voter status (vote switcher, undecided voter, decided voter) and political knowledge were collected from 141 respondents in five southern Illinois counties during a 1974 congressional election and from 295 respondents in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, during the 1976 presidential campaign. The study…

Guidelines for teacher use in developing local vocational homemaking programs for boys and girls in grades 7 through 12 were developed by regional groups of home economics teachers and teacher educators. Local programs should reflect the social, economic, and cultural profile of the community and the current trends in education and society. Part I…

A model demonstrates how low correlations for academic achievement in separate units of instruction can be compatible with high correlations for cumulated achievement. The unit achievement is assumed to consist of a task-specific part and a part correlated with a predictor. When units of learning are cumulated, attrition of earlier learning takes…