Learning and teaching in the Madison, Wisconsin public schools is the focus of this newsletter announced here in a one time basis. The newsletter is issued monthly during the school year. The theme of this issue is the energy crisis, the environment, and careers. A monthly memo, a regular feature, introduces the theme, followed by ideas for the…

This occasional paper excerpts student reaction to the social studies simulation "Economic Systems," developed by Academic Games Associates. Introductory remarks by the series editor emphasize the importance of a debriefing session to allow the relationship of simulation and learning objectives to be assimilated. In this case study, the game is…

In order for research on the educational utility of simultation games to advance, there must be some stipulation of a set of significant variables. This, in turn, requires the building of testable theoretical models and the formulation of strategic propositions to test their validity. An example of the process involved is as follows. Focusing upon…

This study utilized 120 metalworking students and six teachers from Columbus, Ohio area high schools to ascertain the effects of teaching numerical control to industrial arts students by means of simulator-aided activities versus nonsimulator aided activities. Scores obtained from an achievement test, attitude inventory, and word address…

This study was prompted by the lack of a well developed strategy for the diffusion of simulation training materials developed by the Center for Vocational and Technical Education at the Ohio State University for use in vocational leadership development programs. Specifically, the study sought to: (1) describe the strategy employed to diffuse the…

Accounts of the workshops conducted during the morning of the second day of the symposium are contained in this volume. These focus on the economics and financing of cable television (CATV), public ownership of cable, community and local programing, and minority participation in CATV. Visual presentations dealing, respectively, with research…

The materials in this booklet simulate some of the problems that area superintendents could face working in actual situations. Taken from the real-life problems of some area superintendents, the exercises are presented in the form of in-basket items -- letters, memos, phone messages, etc. -- that require some action on the part of the person…

A game designed to introduce elementary and middle school students to the primary election process and its operational elements through simulation and role playing activities is presented in this document. A hypothetical town of Notae which has been controlled by one political party for years without resulting change is described. Issues in the…

Higher education faces continuing cost pressures from a multitude of new demands. The consequence is a new emphasis upon resource allocation that is only possible if the required data about program costs, program outputs, and program income are readily available. The task of the new management in higher education is to gather the needed…

As the first step in a program to develop quantitative techniques for prescribing the design and use of training systems, the present study attempted: to compile an initial set of quantitative indices, to determine whether these indices could be used to describe a sample of trainee tasks and differentiate among them, to develop a predictive…

CITY III is a computer-assisted simulation game in which participants make decisions affecting the economic, governmental, and social conditions of a simulated urban area. In one of its five city options (called Lothian) the CITY III simulation model focuses on a micro-view of an urban area by reducing the level of aggregation. The population is…

To determine the effects of administrator expectation, school social class, and teacher experience on the quality of curricula developed by teachers at the local level in small planning groups, two levels of administrative expectation and two levels of school social class were simulated in a 2 x 2 design. Twenty-seven groups of three secondary…

This report, prepared by the Academic Games program of the Center, investigates the effects of the game Democracy on the political attitudes of junior high school students through two studies. The game focuses on the process of log-rolling, which the players, assuming the role of congressmen, quickly discover to be the most effective way to…

Any general systems approach has five basic elements, which serve as the tasks for the researcher using systems analysis. The five are (1) the objectives, (2) the alternatives, (3) the costs, (4) the model (or models), and (5) the decision rule. With these five steps, the researcher should be able to specify the objectives, select alternatives,…

A basic unsolved problem in science is that of understanding learning, the process by which people and machines use their experience in a situation to guide future action in similar situations. The ideas of Piaget, Pavlov, Hull, and other learning theorists, as well as previous heuristic programing models of human intelligence, stimulated this…