Prepared for a 1984 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) conference, this report on the educational applications of new information technologies focuses primarily on the use of interactive audiovisual systems. Potential advantages of interactive multimedia educational environments are discussed and examples are given of…

Educators find themselves in the position of being ordered to classify pupils for remedial and compensatory programs at the same time that some of their classifying practices are being challenged both in educational research and in court. School classifications are largely the function of testing. The task for educators is to understand the state…

A study examined decisions involving private, postsecondary vocational schooling using three large, national sets of data (from the National Longitudinal Surveys) on males. Particular attention is paid to three target groups--inner-city and rural individuals and dropouts. Various equations were estimated using a life-cycle model of time allocation…

A study examined decisions involving private, postsecondary vocational schooling using three large, national sets of data (from the National Longitudinal Surveys) on males. Particular attention is paid to three target groups: inner-city and rural individuals and dropouts. Various equations were estimated using a life-cycle model of time allocation…

This study seeks evidence for the validity of the concept of egocentrism in children. Three standard egocentrism tests are intercorrelated to determine the degree to which they appear to be measuring a single construct (convergent validity); whether the three tasks intercorrelate more than they do with a theoretically unrelated task (discriminant…

Research supported by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation.

To further investigate the relationship between divergent thinking and bilingualism, 23 Anglos and 108 Mexican Americans from a semi-rural West Texas community and 24 Mexican Americans from San Antonio, enrolled in the fourth grade, of low socioeconomic status, and with an average age of 10 years 6 months, were divided into 5 experimental groups,…

Commentary and advice in four legal areas are offered in this newsletter on educational law. First, the document outlines preventive legal review for public educators in four basic steps, including anticipation of legal challenges, evaluation of the challenges' legal merits, consideration of the policy issues raised by potential challenges, and…

To help public schools minimize litigation, this newsletter recommends constitutional and legal training for public school officials and examines relevant court cases involving school official liability, intelligence tests, and religion in the schools. According to the authors, the Maine v. Thiboutot and Owen v. City of Independence cases…

A study explored the relation between Piagetian conservation tasks, IQ scores, and reading test scores. A series of 16 items involving conservation tasks for area, length, weight, and volume were presented to 516 students in grades four through nine. The scores on these conservation items were correlated with students' scores on achievement and IQ…

To assess the effects of age differences, type of task, intelligence (IQ), and reading achievement on referential communication performance, third and fifth grade children were asked to communicate messages for three types of tasks: word pairs, picture descriptions, and school-locations directions. The latter was specifically designed to assess…

The existence of a global language proficiency factor is discussed. This factor, cognitive/academic language proficiency (CALP), is directly related to IQ and to other aspects of academic achievement. It accounts for the bulk of reliable variance in a wide variety of language learning measures. Three propositions concerning CALP are reviewed. (1)…

Recent legal decisions, coupled with Federal and State statutes, require the New York City Board of Education to follow definite guidelines in providing equal educational opportunities for its handicapped children. Among the problems raised are those of classification and labeling, criticized by some as a procedure that focuses more on pathology…

This paper presents and evaluates the broad results of pre-school intervention experiments and programs aimed at fostering the intellectual and social development of "disadvantaged" groups. Among the general findings discussed are (1) there is a "sensitive," or even "critical," period in child development, an age at…

Part of a set of 10 booklets on talented and gifted education, the booklet discusses the identification of talented and gifted students. A definition of talented and gifted students is offered, and its implications for school programs considered. State of Oregon guidelines for talented and gifted programs are presented. General and specific…