Describes religious illiteracy among undergraduate students. Examines high school textbooks in United States and world history, economics, home economics, and biology. Finds religion almost completely ignored. Argues that the religious neutrality mandated by the Supreme Court effectively eradicates religion from the curriculum. Suggests a new test…

Examines the cultural contents of English textbooks in Japan over the past 120 years. When Anglo-American culture was admired, textbooks reflected British and American values. When Japanese culture was admired, English textbooks reflected traditional Japanese values. Implications for the role of nationalism in teaching English for cross-cultural…

Gives an overview of various linguistic software tools in the field of intelligent text handling that are being developed in Germany utilizing artificial intelligence techniques in the field of natural language processing. Syntactical analysis of documents is described and application areas are discussed. (10 references) (LRW)

A study involving 32 undergraduate students was conducted to identify mechanisms by which instructional objectives affect learning. Protocols for thinking out loud were examined for evidence of rehearsal activity. Results suggest that instructional objectives enhanced real-time rehearsal activity, recall, and reading time. (TJH)

Examines 11 randomly selected English handbooks to determine the currently published guidelines for avoiding sexist language. Reveals that major differences exist among these handbooks when dealing with equality in language and suggests that feminist teachers exert leadership when selecting handbooks. Ranks five handbooks from offensive to…

Examines mathematical models of style analysis, focusing on the pattern in which literary characteristics occur. Describes an autoregressive integrated moving average model (ARIMA) for predicting sentence length in different works by the same author and comparable works by different authors. This technique is valuable in characterizing stylistic…

Two experiments studied whether 110 first, third, and fifth graders' difficulties in detecting inconsistencies in text were related to their failure to represent inconsistent propositions in memory or failure to compare them although remembered. Shortcomings were related more to difficulties in forming mental representations than in comparing…

Compares the visual structuring of the 1976 and 1984 nationally televised presidential campaign debates, isolating changes in visual structuring that could interfere with the comprehension of verbal content, undermine the political purpose of the encounters, and promote unequal visual treatment of candidates. Reveals three changes in visual…

Two mathematics curricula ("Distar Arithmetic" and "Scott Foresman Mathematics" and two arithmetic tests ("KeyMath" and the "Iowa Tests of Basic Skills" for grades one-three were examined for correspondence of content and types of learning required. A consistent lack of content correspondence was found among…

Assesses aggressive behavior on television in terms of its realism. Replicated and contextualized reality were assessed for 100.5 hours of programming. Replicated reality compared television portrayals to real world characteristics, and was similar in seriousness to aggression and gender patterns of perpetrators and victims. Contextual reality…

Describes a study that examined the coverage of African American reference books in reference book reviewing media. Topics addressed include review recommendation statements; content analysis of reviews; review selection criteria; use of audience as a constraint on review evaluations or to exclude reviews; and review editors. (Contains eight…

Asserts that international trade, as compared with international finance or even international economics, is primarily an applied microeconomics field. Discusses decomposition analysis in relation to international trade and tariffs. Reports on an evaluation of the treatment of this topic in eight college-level economics textbooks. (CFR)

Two contemporary films, "Braveheart" and "Rob Roy," depict Scottish ethnicity from a rather narrow perspective. The positions that are sentimentally admired when attributed to white natives of Scotland are horrifying when expressed by contemporary peoples of color. These films raise interesting questions about the true nature…

Explores ways people learn from text. Content overlap between a text and the reader's prior knowledge is identified as one factor. Methods are proposed to identify whether a text is suitable for readers with a specific background. The usefulness of coherence gaps that stimulate constructive activities is discussed. (SLD)

Argues that teachers need to become "informed consumers" of standardized tests in order to influence decisions about test use and about ways to help students perform at their best. Six strategies for considering the content of a test form are presented. (LR)