To investigate the effect of violating the assumption of equal item difficulty on Kuder-Richardson (KR) Formula 21 reliability coefficient, 670 eighth-and ninth- grade students were administered 26 short, homogeneous "tests" of mathematics concepts and skills. Both KR Formula 20 and KR Formula 21 were used to estimate reliability on each…

This paper analyzes Brainerd's work in assessing the developmental sequence or ordination and cardination concepts of number, and describes a study which investigated the hypothesis that task-specific difficulty could explain Brainers's data. Three new tasks were designed for the assessment of ordination and cardination and administered to a…

Aspects of syntax and semantics which affect sentence comprehensibility were investigated for their effects on children's understanding of the dependency relationship of subordinate to main clauses in sentences. Children in grades 2, 4, 6, and 8 were asked to select the main content from orally presented sentences by checking a picture which…

Two grammars (traditional and transformational) and two methods of teaching (direct and indirect) were measured to determine their effects upon the writing performance of students of low socioeconomic backgrounds. While the direct teaching of grammar was concerned with the correction of specific errors, the indirect teaching was concerned with a…

This study examined the responses of 10th-grade students of low, average, and high abilities to two levels of short stories: the complex, or adult, story and the less complex, or adolescent story. Students read four pairs of short stories and wrote their immediate and delayed responses to tests containing two open-ended questions and 10 objective…

The study constitutes a preliminary investigation of several important factors in the design and implementation of adaptive training research. The effects of using various adaptive stepping criteria upon performance were studied. Comparison of adaptive and nonadaptive training techniques were also made. The tested hypotheses were that: (1) there…

Evaluation of instructional programs involves the process of ascertaining the decisions to be made. The decision maker, not the evaluator, determines the questions to be asked or the decisions to be made. A second task of evaluation deals with the specification of required information in light of system objectives. The task of the evaluator…

This paper describes two studies conducted to investigate young children's manipulative responses to materials in a free play situation and to examine the resultant learning. Study I: Each child played with either a simple or a complex set of materials during three play sessions. Learning was measured on a posttest of classification ability.…

The three purposes of this study were (1) to examine the effect of the frequency of Latin-suffixed words on the cloze performance of readers, (2) to examine the effect of reading materials in different content areas on cloze performance, and (3) to determine whether general reading ability differentially affected cloze scores in various content…

Two aspects of motivation were investigated in this study: the use of individual incentives to enhance learning, and the effect of different levels of task difficulty on the effectiveness of these individualized incentives. One hundred-forty-two fourth and fifth grade students were subjects. Individual preferences for rewards that would serve as…

The article describes a research project which tried to determine if dogmatic students take less than average time to study non-complex tests, and if they do, whether this is because of a "know-it-all" attitude or to avoid decision-making anxiety. (CD)

In secondary-task reading experiments, easy text filled cognitive capacity more completely than difficult text. A cognitive interpretation is that, in reading easy passages, the cognitive processors are full. But in difficult passages, frequent breakdowns in comprehension temporarily empty processor spaces, leaving cognitive capacity for the…

Good, normal, and poor third grade readers were required to read easy, moderate, and difficult one-syllable nouns under three conditions: control condition with no pictures, identifying-picture condition, and unrelated-picture condition. Reading performance of poor readers was influenced by pictures under all conditions. Individual differences…

Two experiments investigated the effects of four teaching treatments on sixth graders' learning of an ecology curriculum. Recitation was more significant in improving learning than the other treatments--probing or followup questioning; redirection of a question to another student; and higher cognitive questioning. (Author/CP)

Providing examinees with advanced knowledge of the difficulty of an item led to an increase in test performance with no loss of reliability. This finding was consistent across several test formats. ( Author/JKS)