Fifty-one teachers with three or more years of teaching experience participated in an inservice workshop on the development of course content, setting of student performance objectives, and selection of instructional methods. The participants completed questionnaires and check lists which were contrasted with parallel instruments completed by 75…

Military and civil service carpenters, masons, and plumbers were surveyed using a job inventory checklist and relative time spent rating method along with background item responses. Job clustering and job typing of combined responses were performed and comparisons were made between civilian and military groups as well as comparisons between the…

Summaries of results are presented for student achievement on art exercises from a national art assessment program conducted during 1974-75. Two technical reports document the results of the national assessment. Exercise-by-exercise results are reported in the "Art Technical Report: Exercise Volume" (see TM 006 981). This report, a companion to…

The Distar and Open Court reading programs illustrate contrasting definitions and emphases of reading instruction that are part of a larger concern--how children are expected to use their literacy skills. Both programs teach phonics, but they define phonics in different ways. Each relies on teacher-directed group instruction, but Open Court was…

The goal of this study was to assess the relationship between amount of instructional time and student achievement. Two questions were addressed: (a) Do students who have more time allocated to a particular subject area also learn more in that area? and (b) Do students who spend more "engaged time" in a particular subject area learn more in that…

The four main approaches to measuring treatment effects in schools; raw gain, residual gain, covariance, and true scores; were compared. A simulation study showed true score analysis produced a large number of Type-I errors. When corrected for this error, this method showed the least power of the four. This outcome was clearly the result of the…

A study made at the University of South Carolina compared the survival (persistence) rates of full-time black and white students who entered the university as freshmen during the fall semesters of 1973, 1974, and 1975. Survival is defined as the percentage of students in an entering class who return for a second or subsequent years' enrollment at…

The undergraduate student body in the College of Engineering at the University of South Florida was studied to determine if there were significant differences in the grade-point ratios (GPRs), withdrawals, and forgivenesses of students in several categories. (The foregiveness policy permits a student to repeat a course and have that grade computed…

An experiment was conducted with twenty native French speakers using a set of four reading passages, each followed by five multiple choice comprehension questions. Each subject was tested twice when reading aloud and twice when reading silently. Other test materials included a pre-test designed to check whether certain lexical items from the…

The state of academic advisement in postsecondary education was studied through a survey of representatives of 58 colleges and universities and students who were pursuing undergraduate degrees in four-year institutions during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. About 59 percent of the institutions were public, 41 percent were private, and 22 percent had…

In formulating an official language policy, a country must consider cultural, social, political and economic factors. Alternative policies on language instruction can be categorized into three groups: 1) subordination of the home language to the country's dominant language; 2) bilingual maintenance through the simultaneous provision of instruction…

A study was conducted to determine the effectiveness of a 5-hour- on-the-job writing course compared to a 30-hour college business communication course. The short business English refresher course focused on grammar, punctuation, and spelling; audience analysis; and direct, negative, and persuasive letters and memos. The college course focused on…

Based on a five month participant-observation study of two schools, this paper describes the organization and curriculum of English primary schools, with an emphasis upon strategies and materials used in developing linguistic competence in school children. The report describes the organization, curriculum, and development of communication…

Fifty-eight studies relating to the "knowledge gap" hypothesis (a theory that correlates public knowledge to educational level and mass media exposure) are examined in this report. In the opening sections, the theory is defined, and the early information diffusion studies and public opinion polls that led to its formulation in 1970 are…

The graduation rates of the fall semester freshman classes that entered the Indiana University Bloomington (IU) campus between 1970-1977 (excluding 1973) were examined, and the results of a 1975 survey were extended. In addition, the current analysis examines the graduation rate of each class in relation to student race and sex, and new…