A group of supervisors of student-teachers developed a list of competencies that educators of student-teachers should be able to demonstrate and then developed activities, or indicators, that would allow educators to demonstrate these competencies in their own subject areas. The competency indicators/activities were tested by English supervisors…

The trend toward establishing minimal competency requirements for high school graduation led the Speech Communication Association to establish a task force that would recommend what speaking and listening skills should be required of high school graduates in the United States. This paper describes the work of that task force, indicating the…

To determine the relationship between age and risk taking for community college students, 74 male and 72 female students, ranging from 18-79 years of age, took a vocabulary test in which six "nonsense" items were interspersed among 54 legitimate items (following Slakter's procedure). Test instructions explained a penalty would be levied for…

Eight hypothetical college instructors were evaluated by 174 white and 129 black college students. Each instructor's teaching performance was described using statements of predetermined favorability. Three levels of teaching performance, good, average, and poor were described. Instructor race was manipulated through the use of photographs. Three…

Four papers are included in this document concerning the structure of linguistic input to children. Dan Slobin's paper, "Questions of Language Development in Cross-Cultural Perspective," suggests that children everywhere acquire basic grammatical competence in the first five or six years of life, regardless of social milieu or linguistic…

A random half of the instructors of an introductory course in computer programming were given feedback from students' evaluations of instructional effectiveness conducted at the middle of the term. The impact of the feedback was assessed against three criteria: (1) change in students' evaluations between mid-quarter and end-of-quarter; (2)…

Teaching is an omnibus profession, but each teacher is a self-sufficient individual and many yardsticks are needed to measure competence in this role. The evaluation of a teacher should, in principle, be bound to what students learn and to the attitudes and values they hold over the long haul. In practice, however, we tend to separate teaching…

A series of studies carried out in Aberdeen, Scotland and Lancaster England is used to illustrate changing interests in the area of personality and learning. The early studies looked for general relationships, adopting a psychometric approach. Recent work has been focused more on the process of learning, particularly in higher education, and on…

An integrated model of student variables which predict scores on a reliable teaching evaluation form is presented. Subjects were 249 undergraduate commuter students at a small midwestern university who completed one of 10 different courses specifically selected to provide a representative sample of courses at this university. These courses…

This paper reports on a study in which the speech and the writing of college freshmen were compared. Spoken samples were gathered from classroom discussion; written samples were taken from pieces written on the discussion material in a later class session. Spoken and written samples from an "A" student, a "B+" student, a "B" student, and a "C"…

This paper describes the instructor selection process for a television course in health education for undergraduate students. Since presenter selection may be critical for instructional effectiveness, the selection process was designed to utilize objective data to predict the presenter's impact on the intended audience. Audience appeal or ability…

Proposes a peer-teaching-peer strategy that utilizes the low-achieving External as the tutor, a reversal of the usual procedure. The assumption is that the External must experience and perceive personal control over another child in order to begin orientation toward a more internal outlook. (Author)

The role of reinforcement has long been an issue in learning theory. The effects of reinforcement in learning were investigated under circumstances which made the information necessary for correct performance equally available to reinforced and nonreinforced subjects. Fourth graders (N=36) were given a pre-test of 20 items from the Peabody Picture…

The present study employed discrete trial procedures to compare the performance of skilled and less-skilled third and sixth grade readers (N=37) on picture, letter and word naming tasks. It was assumed that if lack of proficiency in reading skill is due to a general name-retrieval deficit, then the skilled readers would be able to name each…

Pupils, teachers, and principals in urban elementary schools were interviewed to determine how administrative leadership styles and types of feedback mechanisms affect the academic achievement of two groups of pupils: those enrolled in Title I remedial reading programs, and those enrolled in the regular curriculum. Two components of administrative…