The articles in this volume, focusing on the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed for competent evaluation of teaching, were originally presented at the National Symposia for Professionals in Evaluation and Research (NSPER:82) conferences in Portland, Oregon; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and New Orleans, Louisiana. After an introduction by…

This School Improvement Model study examined the efficacy of three methods to improve administrator judgments of teacher performance: the preliminary perusal of teacher lesson plans, the use of lesson plan evaluation instruments, and the use of low inference (as opposed to high inference) lesson plan evaluation methods. Subjects included 529…

To assist school administrators, this handbook discusses types of supervision and evaluation and suggests ways to assess teacher performance. After a brief introductory section, the handbook's second section addresses five "fictions" about evaluation, including that evaluations must be "objective" and annual, require direct observation and…

An exploratory look at Taiwanese preschool children's compliant and noncompliant behaviors, how teachers responded to the behaviors, and the activity settings in which they occurred is offered in this paper. Observations were made in 10 different preschool centers in the city of Taipei; 5 were laboratory schools and 5 were private centers. A total…

A multitrait-multimethod design provided the basis for variable selection and analysis on the nature of cognitive impulsivity in natural classroom settings. Observational measures were developed for field dependence-independence, as well as for low- and high conceptual level to determine their ecological validity. They were designed to form an…

Behavioral observation has become increasingly important in research in developmental and clinical psychology, as well as in program evaluation and instructional research. Several statistical approaches to assessing the dependability of behavioral observation were reviewed. The demand for accurate and efficient paradigms for behavioral observation…

The major purpose of this study was to define the particular ways children's informal interactions in groups are important in their negotiations of playground games within school settings. Data, gathered over a 3-month period on the playgrounds of three elementary schools, consisted of 23 audiotaped records of children's spontaneously organized…

A study examined the manner in which conversants and observers of conversants attribute intent to messages in ongoing information-seeking conversations. College students were used to evolve and test three scenarios, in which evasion was more or less likely, and a system of classifying intention in information seeking conversations. Fifty-four…

A framework for conceptualizing young children's theoretical and task-related strategies in everyday situations is presented in this Head Start final report. The first section of the report discusses the concept of strategies, reviews relevant literature, and presents a theoretical model of the organization of strategic behavior. The second…

Twenty-six elementary grade learning disabled (LD) students were observed over two entire school days to examine the extent to which students in different service delivery levels were provided with varying instructional approaches and opportunities to learn. Several differences were found in instructional approaches: less severely learning…

Designed for use as supplementary instructional material in a cultural anthropology course, this learning module focuses on the purposes and methods of anthropological fieldwork, and provides an overview of the types of research in which anthropologists engage during their field studies. The module begins by discussing the purpose of participant…

The document examines three case studies of intellectually gifted young children and explores competencies for accurately identifying and nurturing the young gifted child in the regular classroom. An introductory section reviews child development principles, notes characteristics of physical development in gifted children, and considers behaviors…

The effectiveness of three basic approaches to sport skills analysis instruction were examined. Ninety-two physical education majors were allocated to four groups and randomly assigned to one of four instructional frameworks: Observational Model (OM), Common Errors (CE), Correct Only (CO), and Control (C). It was hypothesized that the OM group…

The report describes preliminary results of a study investigating the merits of teaching five severely and multiply handicapped preschoolers to take the initiative during social interaction with an adult using signals/actions already in his/her repertoire. Such initiative was theorized as fundamental to the development of communicative,…

Describes an experiment at the University of Hawaii to test the effectiveness of a set of video-taped Japanese language-and-culture teaching lessons. (PP)