The purpose of this study was to test the effects of relevant instructional variables operating in the post-stimulus period of prewriting on the syntactic complexity (as measured by mean T-unit length) and on syntactic clarity (as measured by number of faulty word order errors) of children's written composition. A short film was used as the…

The concept of scaled achievement tests is discussed and a method of selecting those items of a test that form the most scalable (i.e., having the highest coefficient of reproducibility) subset is presented. Sometimes called a monotonic-deterministic model, this type of test assumes that the test items may be sequentially ordered. To determine the…

An approach for clearer observation of differences when evaluating educational programs is presented. The standardized tests utilized in evaluating programs are designed to measure topics commonly taught and to maximize individual differences. This masks between-program differences and the unique aspects of different programs. Analysis of item…

The research evaluates the effectiveness of a 'Concepts of CIC' program in improving performance on classroom monitoring exercises. The function of the combat information center watch officer (CICWO) course is primarily to train CICWOs in monitoring and evaluating. Two versions of 'Concepts of CIC' were administered to two groups of students in…

To aid in the successful interdisciplinary team planning of vocational education, this study sought to determine: (1) which of certain selected skills in agricultural, distributive, home economics, office, and trade and industrial occupations are being taught at the secondary level, and (2) the similarities in selected instructional content in the…

Undergraduates read a prose passage and were tested on its contents. Difficulty, permission to underline key phrases, and financial motivation were varied. Non-highly motivated subjects performed better on the easy version; underlining aided highly motivated subjects and those reading the difficult version. (Author/RD)

Reports on children's mastery of one type of sentence structure which is derivationally complex and which has been shown to be psychologically complex as well, given the criteria of both comprehension and acceptability to the native speaker. (HOD)

Adults viewed silent videotapes of high- and low-achieving children and estimated the level of understanding revealed by each child. Observers accurately differentiated between understanding and not understanding in spontaneous and deliberate conditions. In the spontaneous conditions, high achievers were perceived as understanding more than low…

Undergraduate males of different achievement orientations received either no feedback or success feedback on six tasks. On later tasks, success feedback had: (1) no effect on learning easy tasks; (2) positive effects on learning difficult tasks for high achievement orientation subjects; and (3) negative effects with low achievement orientation…

Person changes can be of three kinds: developmental trends, swells, and tremors. Person unreliability in the tremor sense (momentary fluctuations) can be estimated from person characteristic curves. Average person reliability for groups can be compared from item characteristic curves. (Author)

In this study, designed to explore the relationship between pleasure and cognitive challenge, 32 normal first grade children and 32 MA-matched familial mentally retarded children were given puzzles representing four difficulty levels. (Author/SB)

These experiments consider the effects of aging on response times to stimuli of increasing complexity in serial choice RT tasks, whether age differences were reduced or abolished on such tasks, and examines repetition effects of a particular coding rule. (Author/RK)

A three-volume series of French language textbooks designed for children is found to be well-designed and well-presented. The quality of the series is judged according to these criteria: presentation of grammar, phonetics, theme, points of interest, characters, setting, photos, as well as the quality of the paper on which the text is printed. (MSE)

Mentally retarded students with and without Down syndrome (N=20) made 2,400 responses on a discrete pursuit-tracking task (aligning a pointer with a target light). Both groups showed significant improvements on the task such that their performance was comparable to nonretarded subjects at the same functional level. (Author/JW)

Reports three experiments with kindergartners and first graders which used one-trial multidimensional reasoning tasks like those of Toppino (Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, v30, p496-512, 1980). Feedback information and preliminary experience with simple forms of the task produced high performance levels, and verbal labeling in the…