This booklet presents a discussion of some moral and philosophical aspects of issues in early childhood education, beginning with a look at the development of Project Head Start. Current educational research is interpreted and distinctions are made between academic and intellectual goals, between achieving and learning, between performing and…

Critiques of the Rosenthal research on experimenter bias and teacher expectancy have demonstrated that few, if any, conclusions can be drawn from it. From other research concerning the factors in and effects of teacher expectancy, it appears that elementary school children make accurate perceptions of subtle affective and cognitive behaviors of…

A nursery school teacher received three types of training in self-observation skills, which were compared with regard to their effects on the accuracy of the self-observations. Minimal training consisted of a brief description of the behaviors to be recorded. The feedback condition incorporated daily information about the accuracy of the…

The purpose of this study was to examine the classroom questions of teachers of science, English and social studies and to determine whether the frequency and types of questions were related to changes in pupil critical thinking. The author hypothesized science teachers would ask more questions and higher level questions than teachers of English…

The first stage of self-concept development concerns the parents' treatment of the child. Parents are advised to be accepting and supportive of children, particularly toddlers. Punishment and repression of toddlers' curiosity has deleterious effects on their emotional development. The second critical variable in establishing a sense of self…

A basic quality of the open classroom is that children are encouraged to make choices. Psychological rationales for allowing children to make choices are taken from psychological theory: (1) the objective of education, stated by Piaget and others, is to develop creative and independent thinkers; (2) children are intrinsically motivated to learn:…

The school, often inadvertently and unconsciously, subordinates ethnic and racial minorities. School mechanisms have developed which tend to support ethnic isolation, perpetuate stereotyping and other myths, and in manifold ways differentially treat minorities. School segregation, ability grouping, student fees, and curricular or extracurricular…

This study was designed to identify stable and meaningful aspects of teaching behavior pertaining to the individualization of instruction in special classes for the retarded. Ten predominantly urban classes for intermediate educable mentally retarded pupils were selected from the total of 32 such classes in a large city. These classes were…

Role consensus is the extent to which agreement exists among the individuals in a group, between groups, or between cities. In three markedly different communities, teachers, principals, superintendents, school boards, and citizens were surveyed for their views on 45 norm items pertaining to the role of the elementary school teacher. Within each…

This document reports on an observation instrument and data obtained over 2 years as part of the national evaluation of project Follow Through. Data was collected from 70 kindergarten and first grade classrooms involved 7 different experimental programs and including 2 comparison (control) classrooms. The primary instrument used to measure teacher…

Corporal punishment and its implications are discussed in this speech in Dallas, where corporal punishment is officially sanctioned as a method of school discipline, and in many other parts of the country, the prevailing opinion is that corporal punishment is necessary, effective and harmless. But the effectiveness of such punishment is dubious…

The linear orientation toward the teaching of speech communication courses designed for prospective teachers is criticized in this study for its too simplistic speaker/message/receiver paradigm. In support of the position that a far broader and more complex pattern of communication must be embraced if any contemporary theorizing about…

The Committee on Performance-Based Teacher Education (PBTE) of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education reported that adequate evaluation is critical to the success of PBTE. Some basic measurement and decision-making concerns are crucial to such an evaluation. Essential is a list of competencies. Problems in assessing attainment…

Objective scores and judges' ratings, both based on a complex personal assessment battery, were correlated with a pupil-gain criterion of teaching effectiveness and with a number of observationally derived measures of classroom teaching behavior. Twenty-seven primary teachers were studied who had demonstrated consistent patterns of pupil gain over…

Several high inference ratings were made on a sample of 31 second- and third-grade teachers selected for study because of their consistency in producing student gains on the Metropolitan Achievement Test over three successive years. Data consist of scales, checklists, and percent estimates filled out by coders after or during classroom…