Concluded that studies of coaching for the Scholastic Aptitude Test were methodologically flawed but that some definite regularities could be identified. These regularities indicated size of score effects was related to amount of student contact time in coaching programs. (Author/DB)

Changes were studied that occur when the correlations between the six Medical College Admission Test scales and the scores on the Part I examination of the National Board of Medical Examiners are corrected for restriction of range. (MLW)

Examines the effects of an organization development intervention in seven elementary parochial schools. Four areas were studied: goal agreement, reported use of process skills, relationship between process skills and goal agreement, and diffusion of the effects of the intervention to new teachers. (Author/IRT)

This article discusses research design problems peculiar to work with intellectually disabled subjects, such as discrepancies in uses of control groups and mental age matching, definitions of subject groups and variability within and between subject groups. Suggestions for minimizing these problems are made and alternative methodologies offered.…

Discusses an 8-year follow-up study to a smoking prevention program for 13- to 15- year-old students, who were taught the skills to resist pressures to start smoking. Consistent evidence of preventive effects was found among those students who had been non-smokers when the program began. (Author/JS)

This paper identifies methodological and practical problems in studies of child maltreatment, including developing classification schemes for multiple forms of maltreatment; distinguishing between chronic maltreatment and isolated incidents; choosing criteria for selecting comparison groups; determining whether comparison groups have experienced…

Eight predictor variables from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, the Bender Gestalt, and a Malingering Scale differentiated 20 prison inmates faking insanity from 40 nonfaking controls. A second experiment with 22 substance abusers faking insanity and 20 schizophrenics also supports the use of the test battery to detect faking. (SLD)

Ninety-two research reports involving specifically language-impaired subjects were reviewed. Analysis showed few consistent trends with respect to subject selection, subject description, and the number and types of control groups. The importance of more complete subject descriptions and matching criteria for control groups is discussed.…

Subjects were interviewed to determine smoking habits of 9,252 current cigarette smokers (11 percent black) and 7,555 former smokers (6 percent black). More blacks than whites smoked. Blacks were three times more likely to be light smokers than heavy smokers. Effective prevention may require better understanding of cultural factors affecting…

Sixty-nine graduate students in a statistics class participated in this study of the effects of self-monitoring on learning and attitudes toward learning. Self-monitoring subjects recorded learning activities and rated their problem-solving efficacy. As predicted, the self-monitoring group performed better than did the instructor-monitoring and…

Studied general and differential effects of an experimental mathematics program on student achievement in secondary education. Participants were Dutch seventh graders, 222 in the experimental program and 222 in a control group. Results suggest that lower-achieving students can benefit from strategy instruction as long as the instruction is not too…

Thirty-two factual statements, half consistent and half not consistent with subjects' prior knowledge, were processed by 140 sixth and seventh graders. Half were directed to use elaborative interrogation (using prior knowledge) to answer why each statement was true. Across all memory measures, elaborative interrogation subjects performed better…

A conceptual model was tested in which mentoring relationships were hypothesized to reduce substance use both directly and indirectly through improvements in adolescents' self-perceptions and close relationships. The study included 928 young adolescents (M age = 12.25), all of whom applied to Big Brothers Big Sisters programs. The adolescents were…

In this study we compared the effects of smallgroup constructivist and explicit mathematics instruction in basic multiplication on low-achieving students' performance and motivation. A total of 265 students (aged 8-11 years) from 13 general and 11 special elementary schools for students with learning and/or behavior disorders participated in the…

Measures of sentence recall and past tense marking were used to examine the similarities and differences between children with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), children with specific language impairment (SLI), and typically developing (TD) children. Both SLI and ADHD group means for sentence recall tasks were significantly lower…