This report describes a project which analyzed science and social studies textbooks to determine how well they accommodate the learning needs of mainstreamed hard-to-teach students. A textbook analysis tool was developed, and eight teacher-reviewers examined the instructional design of teachers' and students' editions of 12 leading elementary and…

Noting that daytime television serials have been used to teach a variety of subjects, including writing and language skills, this paper reviews literature on the nature of soap operas so that instructors can use them more effectively. Following an introduction citing studies on the educational uses of soap operas, the paper explores the following…

Depictions of evil in the modern American vigilante film of the 1970s and 1980s fall into several categories. Modern vigilante film may be defined as film concerning the efforts of a private citizen in the late twentieth century urban environments of New York City or Los Angeles to operate outside the law in ridding the streets of evil and crime.…

Akira Kurosawa, the most popular Asian film maker with audiences in the United States, has found in William Shakespeare's plays themes and plots that resonate within Japanese culture. While the translations of "Macbeth" into "Throne of Blood" and "King Lear" into "Ran" are quite direct and literal with only…

The image of the family as a secure refuge against a threatening outside world has persisted in the television sitcom since its inception in the early 1950s. Although some television programs have dealt with major problems directly, most, including the sitcom, have completely ignored them. Harnessing hysteria over the possibility of a nuclear…

Eighteen naval fire technicians served as subjects in a study using scenarios to simulate a real world task for assessing the readability of general technical texts. The scenario asked subjects to read a segment of text and to explain to a colleague how the particular component described in the passage functioned. Subjects' summaries were assessed…

A study of the lyrics of popular music was conducted to test the hypothesis that from the 1950s through the 1970s such songs placed a progressively greater emphasis upon physical as opposed to emotional love. Researchers analyzed the lyrics of the five most popular songs listed in "Billboard" magazine during every year from 1950 to 1980.…

Intended to help teachers who want to offer their students the best native American literature, this paper analyzes a selection of books written by and about native Americans, in particular the Navajo Indians. The criteria used to select materials for the paper include historical accuracy, cultural accuracy, idealism versus realism, and reader…

Given the important role written questions have as a teaching strategy and their apparent use in textbooks, this study examined the written questions posed in representative American history textbooks intended for students at the seventh and eighth grade levels. Ten textbooks were randomly selected from a larger group of texts. Three chapters in…

A study was conducted to explore the way network television news observes three countries friendly to the United States: Australia, Canada, and Japan. Every news story from 1968 to 1983 on the ABC, CBS, and NBC networks that mentioned any of the three countries or their people was examined. Coders classified the 4,038 stories based on origin,…

A study analyzed the visual content of the 1984 New Hampshire and California Democratic candidate debates to determine how Jesse Jackson was portrayed by television. The New Hampshire debate was chosen because it offered the first opportunity for Jackson to be heard and compared to the other, more media-prominent candidates. The California debate…

A taxonomy for literature reviews in education and psychology is presented. The increased use of the descriptor "literature review" in ERIC and Psychological Abstracts documents between 1969 and 1983 is cited as creating the need for categorization. The taxonomy categorizes reviews according to focus, goal, perspective, coverage,…

Data from five first-place orations from the earliest Interstate Oratorical contests (1874-1878) and five recent first-place orations (1978-1982) were analyzed to determine their subjects or prominent theme, the patterns of organization that were employed, and the types of evidence the speakers used. Following this, historical conclusions were…

A four-month investigation was conducted of media coverage of two controversies involving government officials in Detroit, Michigan. Data were gathered from three sources: journalists involved in covering the stories, people involved in the stories, and the printed stories. Using public documents, the history of one of the controversies was…

Using Chaim Perelman's concept of the "universal audience" as a method of analysis, an investigation was made into the images of equality under the law in two landmark Supreme Court rulings on segregation, "Plessy v. Ferguson" and "Brown v. Board of Education." The analysis revealed that the Supreme Court in both…