It is the premise of this study that the performance of black students in math and science is crippled by the interference of their language patterns. It is argued that schoolwork of these students demonstrates how nonstandard English can lead to misunderstanding. The connection between students' misunderstandings of certain quantitative relations…

The contributions of acceptance of misconceptions about mathematics, mathematical self-concept, and arithmetic skills to mathematics anxiety and to statistics course performance were studied in 92 adult students aged 18 to 57 with a median age of 27, (16 males and 76 females). Results showed that acceptance of misconceptions and mathematical…

Misconceptions high school students have about constructs in the BASIC programming language were examined in this study. A total of 96 high school students received a screening test after a semester course in BASIC programming, and 56 of these students were subsequently interviewed by means of questions and short programs prepared in advance. The…

False-positive and false-negative dicisions are the fundamental errors committed with a mastery test; yet the estimation of the likelihood of committing these errors has not been investigated. Accordingly, two methods of estimating the likelihood of committing these errors are described and then investigated using Monte Carlo techniques.…

This paper examines the multivariate multiple regression model and explores its applicability to communication research. The first section discusses partitioning of a data matrix, as a heuristic device for distinguishing among alternative regression models. Section two examines various aspects of univariate multiple regression, including the form…

This scholarly paper assesses biases due to measurement errors in structural equation models of the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic status by estimating unobserved variable models with data from the remeasurement program of the 1973 Occupational Changes in Generation-II survey. It is noted that reports of social background and…

The limitations of both methods, and their practical applications, are discussed. (RM)

Analyzes a corpus of 360 errors made by Polish university students in the German department. Sets up categories of interference-induced and non-interference-induced errors. Relates error analysis to teaching techniques. (Text is in German.) (DH)

Defining a "misconception" as an error of translation (transformation, correspondence, interpolation, interpretation) between two different kinds of information which causes students to have incorrect expectations, a Taxonomy of Errors has been developed to examine student misconceptions in an introductory biology course for science…

The hypothesis that word context reduces visual rather than acoustic confusion between possible targets was tested in a series of experiments. All involved tachistoscopic presentation of letter strings followed by a pattern mask. Data from eight college students showed that target letters that are confusable only visually and acoustically…

A seriation task (assembling a set of nesting cups) was used in this study to examine developmental changes in young children's ability to restructure a situation. Forty young children, eight each at 18, 24, 30, 36, and 40 months of age, participated in the study. Each child was presented with five nesting cups and was told he or she could play…

A reading test and three cloze tests (English, health, and social studies passages with fifth/sixth grade readability levels) were administered to 410 ninth grade students to study the relationship between cloze errors and reading ability. Six types of incorrect responses were considered: synonymous, syntactically acceptable but semantically…

Implementation of an adaptive achievement test for teaching signed-numbers operations to junior high students is described. A computer program capable of finding 240 basic errors in signed-number computations was written on the PLATO system and used for analyzing a 64-item conventional test, as well as an adaptive test of addition problems. The…

Forty-three first-grade children, who had received no formal instruction in addition and subtraction, were individually administered 20 problems that could be solved using addition or subtraction. The problems were selected to represent the following semantic types: joining, separating, part-part-whole, comparison, and equalizing. Responses were…

A free response cloze test was administered to 31 third graders to test the hypothesis that qualitative as well as quantitative differences in syntactic abilities or skills exist between good and poor readers. The subjects were divided into two reading level groups (good readers and poor readers) according to their scores on the SRA Assessment…