A pilot study concerning the range of writing skills of intermediate students of English as a second language (ESL) is reported. The study identified the clause structures and relative low-order linguistic skills in the writing samples of 25 college students in this group. The method of evaluation of writing samples was a model of conformity to…

Presented in this report are selected findings of the Income Verification Pilot Project (IVPP), an investigation examining misreporting of applicant income and family size on applications for government-sponsored school meal benefits. As reported here, Phase II of the project provided for a comprehensive assessment of specific quality assurance…

A study of young children's assignment of nouns to gender categories and general mastery of the Icelandic gender system is reported. An examination of what is involved in the induction of formal categories such as gender introduces the proposal of a "principle of localness." This principle states that the closer in proximity a closed…

Writing problems common among many college students are "phrasal" errors such as limited vocabulary, inability to distinguish standard usage from slang or jargon, a tendency to frame thoughts in cliches, a peppering of meaningless intensifiers, and a gift for redundancy and wordiness. To help correct these problems, a text-checking system called…

Major efforts of this project fall into four categories: (1) investigations were performed on the relationship between the dimensionality of a dataset and its underlying cognitive processes; (2) two approaches for diagnosing erroneous rules of operation were developed (an "error vector" system for constructing error diagnostic programs…

The effects of four methods of immediate corrective feedback delivered by computer within a question-based concept and rule learning setting were investigated in this study. A second purpose of the study was to probe the complex relationship between types of corrective feedback and the types of errors made by learners. One hundred and fifty-three…

This paper describes the various procedures associated with the individual interviews that are part of the data gathering processes of the Coordinated Study being carried out by the Mathematics Work Group of the Wisconsin Research and Development Center for Individualized Schooling. The first major section describes the six basic verbal addition…

A study of the use of the complex Finnish morphological rule system in 45 children, aged 20-24 months, examined the children's inflection of nouns and verbs in speech characteristic of everyday Finnish. Analysis of the correct, unanswered, and incorrect test items found six classes of errors, which were then examined for clues to the underlying…

This study was designed to follow up earlier work on mapping instruction. The two main goals were to: (1) test the effectiveness of mapping instruction as a general cure for "buggy" subtraction algorithms, and (2) explore two alternative explanations of how this new form of instruction works. It was hypothesized that mapping cures bugs…

A case study was undertaken to examine the influence of one aspect of signed grammar, transparency of reference of some signs, on the acquisition of possessive pronouns in American Sign Language (ASL). The subject was a hearing child of deaf parents who was learning ASL and English. Data were collected in home visits betwen the ages of 1.1 and 3.2…

This report describes an in-depth analysis of the errors made by users of SOLO, a programming language written for Open University students studying cognitive psychology. The study was designed to (1) determine the effectiveness of SOLO's current error-handling routines by evaluating how often SOLO produced "sensible" messages or…

The nature and extent of corrections made to their records by zero/low income applicants to the Basic Educational Opportunity Grant (BEOG) program was investigated. Behaviors of zero/low income applicants and the total pool of applicants were also compared. It was found that zero/low income applicants and all applicants who were rejected displayed…

Three statistical problems related to criterion-referenced testing are investigated: estimation of the likelihood of a false-positive or false-negative decision with a mastery test, estimation of true scores in the Compound Binomial Error Model, and comparison of the examinees to a control. Two methods for estimating the likelihood of…

Two studies are presented in this report. The first is titled "Empirical Studies of Multilevel Approaches to Test Development and Interpretation: Measuring Between-Group Differences in Instruction." Because of a belief that schooling does affect student achievement, researchers have questioned the empirical and measurement techniques…

Twenty-two college students in science education were given an adjunctive computer-assisted instruction (CAI) program by means of typewriter consoles and computer-controlled colored slide presentations of critical information. Students were pretested, told how to respond at the student console, taught by the Harvard CAI System, and posttested. The…