Many children with learning handicaps have difficulty learning to write numerals. The source of numeral-writing difficulties and some things which can be done to teach or remedy this skill are presented. (MNS)

A language instruction technique that uses students' foreign language errors to point up contrasts and similarities in the native and foreign languages is described as it was used with Albanian students learning French. (MSE)

A collection of student distortions, represented by student-invented variations of theorems, are presented. They were drawn from examination papers of 17-year-old students in Israel. (MNS)

Argues that a major cause of the inconsistent use of the past tense even by very advanced learners of English as a second language is an inadequate understanding of its actual meaning and discourse function. Suggestions are offered for teaching and practicing this tense in context. (SED)

Seeks to assist instructors in recognizing two basic errors that can occur in processing student evaluation data on instructional development efforts; offers a research framework for future investigations of the error tendencies and related issues; and suggests ways in which instructors can confront and manage error tendencies in practice. (MBR)

Ten crucial mathematical concepts with which errors are made are listed, with methods used to teach them to high school students. The concepts concern order, place values, inverse operations, multiplication and division, remainders, identity elements, fractions, conversions, decimal points, and percentages. (MNS)

A test score can be used for individual instructional diagnosis after determining whether: (1) difficulty of the test items was consistent with the complexity of the content measured; (2) items measuring the same underlying process were about equally difficult; and (3) partial credit scoring would increase the reliability of the diagnosis. (LMO)

Illustrated first is the case in which a wrong procedure (with fractions) leads to a correct result. Trying to justify why it works in this case and looking for similar patterns involved interesting algebraic considerations as well as use of computers. (MNS)

A series of common misconceptions with regard to infinite sets is considered. Several notions of infinite numbers proposed by different mathematicians are compared. It is argued that so-called errors should rather be called alternative conceptions. (MNS)

Some of the errors associated with use of data from the National Center for Education Statistics' Higher Education General Information Survey (HEGIS) are described, 1980 HEGIS and census reports of college enrollment are compared in tables of data, and a more cautious use of HEGIS data is recommended. (MSE)

Preschool, second-, and sixth-grade children performed developmentally gradated, easy and difficult visual discrimination tasks in a quiet room or with one of two levels of extraneous auditory stimulation. Subjects' errors, response latencies, and glances away from the task were recorded. (Author/RH)

Two computer-based instructional design strategies were investigated to improve the two-phase process of concept learning by being response sensitive to error patterns. The first strategy determined the format of examples by adaptive or fixed selection; the second strategy adjusted the selection according to rules of generalization and…

The need to provide understandable problems and ways to help children understand problems are explored. An interview with a sixth grader depicts his incorrect strategies and leads to suggestions for teaching problem solving using a range of mathematical models for each operation. (MNS)

An information-processing model was tested for a laboratory visualization task that represents one adaptation of a standardized spatial ability test. The pattern of results suggests that individual differences are a function of differences in the accuracy and/or quality of the mental representation, not just speed of processing. (Author/BW)

Appraises the results of an exercise in which students in a composition class attempted to write detective stories. Concludes that many of their syntactic errors result from their intentions exceeding their level of writing skill. (RBW)