The results of visits by the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems to Arizona's three public universities to observe the status of institutional effort to assess the quality of undergraduate education are presented as a working paper in the final report of the Arizona Board of Regents' Task Force on Excellence, Efficiency and…

One of the working papers in the final report of the Arizona Board of Regents' Task Force on Excellence, Efficiency and Competitiveness, this study focuses on Arizona's university research and economic development. There is concern that America is losing its competitive edge in the crucial areas of science and technology as fewer students study…

Virtually all previous research on the types of tasks that people attempt to accomplish has focused on deductively derived task typologies. This approach has resulted in fruitful research, but has restricted the range of activities considered to be accomplishments. The current study was designed to provide a formal, inductive description of the…

Certainly reasons can be enumerated for the widespread use of handbooks and other "canned" materials in high school debate programs, but the quality of these resources and their actual use by debaters make them competitively negligible in value and counterproductive to the educational and competitive values that the forensic community…

Data from five first-place orations from the earliest Interstate Oratorical contests (1874-1878) and five recent first-place orations (1978-1982) were analyzed to determine their subjects or prominent theme, the patterns of organization that were employed, and the types of evidence the speakers used. Following this, historical conclusions were…

A survey was conducted to examine the use of part-time forensic coaches. Ninety-nine four-year and 47 two-year colleges responded to the questionnaire. Of these, 45 four-year and 10 two-year programs indicated the use of part time coaches. A previous study had indicated that half of all part-time faculty were those who held full-time jobs in…

Since the Middle Ages, sport has survived because of its masochistic and sadistic components. The Greeks, who organized athletic contests into the Olympic Games in 776 B.C., emphasized the relationship between the mind and the body and fair competition, rather than putting emphasis on winning or losing. The Romans preferred the spectacle of…

Various aspects of the collegiate sports scene are examined with special emphasis on recruitment practices. It is suggested that college football and basketball satisfy two public demands: the desire for high level sports entertainment and (particularly in more remote areas) the need for national recognition of local accomplishment. In their…

Competition is evident within all aspects of life, among all types of people, and throughout the recorded history of mankind. Sport as both an educational process and profession is no exception. In recent years, however, the concept of competition has been increasingly subjected to examination by both educators and participants. What is…

The relative effectiveness of alternative reward structures in strengthening group performance on a cooperative math task was investigated by operationalizing four reward structure treatments--one non-contingent pay treatment and three differential pay allocation treatments including two levels of inter-group competition and a group piece-rate pay…

This paper begins with a discussion of a theory of teams in general and then proceeds to a description of a program of research focused on a simple but carefully structured classroom team technique, Student Teams-Achievement Divisions, or STAD. (Author)

This research review concerns the definition of social values, assessing the development of social values with matrix games and decomposed games, the perception of social values and rules of fairness, and the problem of distinguishing the strategic and goal aspects of social values. (SJL)

This paper examines a student subsystem in an urban high school in the deep South that is undergoing desegregation. The focus is on the boundaries developed within the student subsystem that separate the races. A model for desegregation is presented in which ethnic groups attempt to manipulate rewards and resources, yet protect boundaries.…

The article describes an interscholastic competitive cross country running program for adolescent boys and girls at the Wisconsin School for the Visually Handicapped, in which totally blind students are assigned sighted guides, while partially sighted students run alone, guided by colored flags positioned along the course to indicate turns.…

Students' interest in comparing their work to their peers' work was studied at different grade levels and in different motivating situations. The importance of the situational variables differed in two experiments on social comparison interest; awareness of the situational influences on motivation appear to increase with age. (GDC)