The purpose of this pilot project was to develop, use, and film teaching tasks to demonstrate their effectiveness in showing variations in teaching styles. Thirty teaching tasks designed to include a variety of curricular dimensions were developed by 6 observers with considerable experience as preschool teachers and observers; each task listed…

Student feedback in the form of traditional discussions, examinations, and student rating with numerical and open-ended questions, as well as television tapings and peer feedback, are examined to see their effectiveness on improving teacher performance. Self-directed evaluations are also considered, as well as the teachers' personal reactions to…

Written as an aid for writers of Army narrative training literature, this guidebook emphasizes performance-oriented writing (preparation of literature intended to help someone learn and perform job related tasks). The eight chapters contain extensive examples and illustrations. An introductory chapter discusses why and how the guidebook was…

This article describes the reactions of a small sample of college students from a Northeastern, private nonsectarian university to a marriage contract that was designed by a couple on this campus. The major reasons for writing the contract included apprehension about the pre-marital socialization system in our society, concerns regarding marital…

The project described in this article was intended to assess needed competencies in community education administration by fulfilling two primary objectives. First, role descriptions were to be identified in terms of task areas, competencies, and competency indicators for each of four administrative roles: superintendent, district coordinator,…

This document is the final report of the President's Commission on Olympic Sports, established to determine factors impeding, or tending to impede, the United States from fielding its best teams in international competition. It determines that many of the factors inhibiting U.S. capabilities are self-generated and may be traced to lack of…

The effects of achievement-oriented and neutral instructions on the humor ratings of both testing and non-testing cartoons were assessed for high- and low test-anxious students. The effects of humor in reducing state anxiety were also evaluated. Fifty-two undergraduate students were selected on the basis of their Test Anxiety Scale scores. Both…

Although sex differences in reading and related language functions have frequently been reported for both average and retarded readers, the explanations thus far proposed (maturation rate, sex-role development, textbook content, "female bias," and psycho-social factors) do not satisfactorily account for these differences. One hypothesis that might…

A sentence completion task was used to investigate age differences in childrens' ability or inclination to invoke premises and inferences during prose processing, tasks which (according to the constructive hypothesis) adults typically perform. A pilot study confirmed that the sentence completion task was preferable to the recognition paradigm,…

The purpose of this second book of 21 self-contained essays is the same as that of the first volume published in 1972: to bring together the scholarly theory and current research regarding oral interpretation. One third of the essays are centered on literature itself: prose fiction, poetry, and the drama. These essays discuss topics such as point…

By age two, a child begins to form complex sentences by joining two or more sentences or by embedding one sentence into another. Formation of conjoined structures is a simpler process and emerges earlier than that of embedding structures. This paper attempts to answer the following questions: (1) Do children produce or understand embedding…

This report summarizes the design strategy and preliminary conclusions from the first year of a study that attempted to identify educational factors that produce the differences in student achievement between unusually high-performing schools and unusually low-performing schools of similar socioeconomic characteristics. The sample included 21…

A new system for assessing student ratings of instruction has been implemented at the University of Washington. Two major changes are in evidence. First, there is an explicit recognition that student ratings can and do serve multiple functions, and the same evaluative questions are not necessarily appropriate for each. Secondly, there is an…

The report is concerned with research performance and results at the Savoy Aviation Research Lab. Research accomplishments are described according to eight tasks which are of two general types, those dealing with human resources research and those dealing with manned systems research. Specifically, four tasks deal primarily with pilot selection…

This package of materials, developed for teachers in the elementary schools, is designed to help the teacher educate the future voter so that he will be knowledgeable and concerned about environmental problems. This package on Ecosystems has two goals. The first is to help the teacher understand some basic facts and concepts of ecology and the…