Awareness of the presence of sexual double entendres within a word association test was investigated with measures of response time, verbal content of responses, and videotaped facial expressions. Subjects characterized as internal-field independent were found to become aware earlier in the task, to test out their developing hypothesis about the…

This study was designed to examine the effectiveness of social reinforcement as a function of familiarity with the adult agent administering the reinforcers. First and fifth grade children were tested in a marble dropping task on two successive days. On the second day half of the children at each grade level were tested by the same experimenter…

Statistics are an essential tool for making proper judgement decisions. It is concerned with probability distribution models, testing of hypotheses, significance tests and other means of determining the correctness of deductions and the most likely outcome of decisions. Measures of central tendency include the mean, median and mode. A second…

A study of the speech process was conducted. The process is described as one closely linked to the one involved in the problem of the serial order in behavior. It is pointed out that in the speech of young children the grammatical relations that are properties of elementary underlying sentences appear in the grammatical meanings. Six examples of…

It was hypothesized that unstable subject-item interactions on personality scales would be associated with small psychological distances between subjects and items. It was further hypothesized that this relationship would be more demonstrable when the psychological test was more homogeneous. To clarify the rationale of the first hypothesis, an…

Teachers and assistant teachers (N = 32) from two rural counties in North Carolina rated five pre-school educational settings and one hypothesized ideal setting using a semantic differential in order to determine if the semantic differential could be used to reliably differentiate between pre-school educational environments. Five discrepancy…

Scientific investigation begins with the null hypothesis which states that there is no relationship between sets of phenomena or sets of variables. This hypothesis is based on the philosophical and physical principle that there is a tendency toward disorder in the universe. This is also commonly referred to as the law of entropy. In order to…

This article points out the flaws inherent in the hypothetico-deductive formulation of inquiry. (CD)

This study investigated the relationship between internal and external locus of control in subjects in a verbal learning experiment. As hypothesized, the lack of freedom of choice was associated with decreased recall in internals. Being able to choose material lead to faster learning for both internals and externals. (Editor/RK)

Investigates the extent of understanding of the logic of hypothesis testing by high school students, and whether this understanding is related to scholastic achievement or ability as measured by standardized tests. (Author/GA)

This research compares the effectiveness in fostering the development of concept formation skills, of exposure for periods ranging from three to six years to two different methods of teaching mathematics to primary school children, one method (Z. P. Dienes) of the general "discovery" type, the other (H. Fletcher) of the…

The decisive power of an experiment, for both social evaluation research and laboratory experimentation as well, is only as strong as the clarity of the basic assumptions which underlie it. A dialectical methodology is proposed for assessing the influence of key assumptions in both settings. (Author/CTM)

A sample of 278 students enrolled in an introductory statistics course was used to determine which of a set of cognitive and affective variables correlate with course performance. It is suggested that individual diagnostic profiles are useful in establishing prescriptive treatments designed to help students likely to experience difficulty in…

What do parents think is being taught and what do they think should be taught? Here is the results of a survey taken in 1977 to determine how parents assessed educational goals in the Sault Ste. Marie (Ontario) public schools. (Editor/RK)

A series of 13 experiments employing mice systematically investigated shock-elicited activity in a circular field and escape performance in a shuttle box following exposure to either escapable or inescapable shock. Results show that escape interference induced by inescapable shock may be comfortably interpreted in terms of a decreased tendency for…