Unrealistic personal optimism is the perception that undesirable events are less likely and desirable events are more likely to happen to oneself than they are to happen to other similar people. Three experiments were performed to study the relationships among personal optimism, perceived control, and selective activation of the cerebral…

The past and historical future of the Partnership for Rural Improvement (PRI) and its model for rural planning and development are explored. Evolution of the rural-urban conceptual dichotomy is reviewed. Rural is perceived as a state of being rather than a place. Implications of the PRI experience for new knowledge and skills in rural community…

This Technical Committee Report discusses the general implications of creating an age-integrated society for societal institutions by concentrating on basic conceptual issues involved in thinking about the future of aging and the aged in society. An explanation of committee procedures is followed by a discussion of key topics and findings of the…

Demographic data suggest that alcohol abuse among the elderly will increase in proportion to the population growth of that group. Four factors which may cause the elderly to be a highly susceptible group for alcohol problems are: (1) retirement and its boredom, role changes, and financial problems; (2) increased concern with death and losses of…

Created to try to shock people into realizing that a child's world is supersaturated with hundreds of images of savage, noble, lazy, or nonhuman Indians that obscure, misrepresent, and render trivial the rich cultures and histories of Native Americans, the reader is intended for early childhood, elementary, and secondary educators and general…

A program of research was conducted to study transitions from preoperational to concrete operational forms of spatial imagery (area 1), to compare results from spatial imagery studies based on open-ended measures (such as drawings) with results based on reaction time measures (area 2), and to study anticipatory imagery in the contexts of memory…

Before discussing the development of skills for playing elementary school physical education games, this document lists basic assumptions about children, movement education, games, and elementary school physical education. Four basic concepts, which are common to all team games, are identified: (1) use of personal and moving space and finding…

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…

A family's metaphor, the frame of reference or perspective that is created and reflected through a family's use of figurative language, is a key to understanding the underlying values and realities of families. Constructivist theories of language view metaphor as essential to the creation of meaning. From this perspective, using metaphor as a…

A distinction should be made between specific teaching methods (and their improvement) and the more global concept of teacher roles. There are important questions to be answered about how teachers view both the teaching learning process and their contribution to it, as well as how students contribute to this same process. Two men have developed…

This report is the sixth in a series of evaluations of the Queensland (Australia) Pre-School Correspondence Program (PSCP), a preschool program conducted by mail for families living in remote or isolated areas. This report represents teachers' perceptions and evaluations of the program. The introduction to the report outlines the administrative…

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between stereotypic sex role attitudes of classroom teachers and stereotypic reinforcement behaviors towards students. Thirty-three white female preservice and inservice elementary and secondary teachers participated in this study. A projective attitude instrument, written classroom…

This brief paper describes an undergraduate course in rehabilitation counseling. Initially students taking the course learned the prescribed material, but they were unaware of what a person with a particular disabling condition looked like, felt like, or how the public treated that person. As a result, the course extended itself to the real world;…

After a Federal court ordered school desegregation in Dallas, Texas, a study was conducted to determine factors influencing black parents' attitudes toward their children's school. Parents who said their children were in racially mixed schools were shown to be far more satisfied than those who said their children were in all black schools. Broad…

This research deals with the development and relative importance of both the conceptual-cognitive and the aesthetic-affective aspect of the perceptual process at various age levels of children. Three tasks were chosen: (1) sorting drawings of human figures--a task that represents a more conceptual function; (2) expressing preferences for those…