Social isolation and loneliness, cultural shock, and lack of commitment to minority students have been suggested as barriers to educational attainment for many minority college students. Blacks are severely underrepresented in the sciences and in mathematics, and these issues and concerns are not uncommon to black students enrolled in the School…

Reported are findings from a study of the relation of family configuration to family functioning and to young children's cognitive and social development. Each of the 500 participating families had at least one child in elementary school and was interviewed and observed for an average of 15 hours. Findings reported in this paper concern families…

The process used to evaluate progress in identifying the goals to be used in evaluating teacher performance under the Kentucky Career Ladder Program is described. The process pertains to two areas of teacher development: (1) professional growth and development, and (2) professional leadership and initiative. A total of 1,650 individuals were asked…

More than 8,000 secondary school students participated in the AFS International exchange programs in 1983, and this document examines some of the research that investigates the impact of travel abroad and intercultural experiences on personality development. Cigdem Kagitcibasi, in a study of the effects of a 10-month program on student…

The effect of participation in interdisciplinary general education programs on personal and professional development of faculty was investigated at Denison University (Ohio), Earlham College (Indiana), and Kenyon College (Ohio). Faculty members teaching interdisciplinary general education courses in these private liberal arts colleges were…

The Beginning Teacher Assistance Program was adopted by the Virginia Board of Education to ensure that teachers certified by the state demonstrate the minimum competencies necessary to perform satisfactorily. The first section of this booklet describes the program's assessment component and lists the 14 competencies teachers are expected to…

This report presents the results of a study to identify the demographic characteristics of undergraduate students enrolled in agriculture majors at Tennessee universities. These characteristics are analyzed: background data, parental information, high school data, work experience, college experience, and goals. Responses are presented for the…

This set of materials on staff development in research libraries, assembled by the Systems and Procedures Exchange Center (SPEC) of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), focuses on programs and activities designed to provide general skills training related to the work performed in a research library. Contents of the set include: (1)…

Job-related perceptions of medical technologists who had graduated from Illinois State University from 1972 through 1979 were surveyed. Of the 228 mailed questionnaires, 170 were returned. The questionnaire included items in which respondents judged the degree to which self-actualization characteristics were present in their jobs. An additional…

This booklet contains lists of tasks intended to be used by staff support specialists in planning staff development programs for vocational educators. These task lists are to be used by staff support specialists to understand and record the tasks and activities related to the staff development program as a first step in such planning. Task lists…

Guidelines are offered to help the cooperating teacher build an orientation program for student teachers. In the first section, a list of questions offers a framework for introducing the student teacher to the school environment. These questions deal with what kind of people live in the community, what kind of a community it is, how the community…

Changes in political preferences and personal goals of a national sample of college students and University of California-Berkeley (Berkeley) undergraduates of the 1960s and the 1980s were compared, using the university's freshmen survey and the Cooperative Institutional Research Program's nationwide survey of freshmen. Specific attention was…

A series of studies was conducted to investigate the nature of children's goals and the role of goals in children's competence in peer relations. First, a conceptual framework was devised which consisted of eight goal types reflecting social-interpersonal and task-related achievement aspects of game playing: task mastery, approach-oriented…

Despite a growing body of evidence, the common causal factors of plagiarism among international students are still widely seen to be poor language skills or a lack of academic integrity on the part of the students. This research uses the experiences of a particular cohort of students to explore these assumptions. It investigates and compares the…

A program was designed to reduce communication apprehension by using systematic desensitization, rhetoritherapy, and selected instructional strategies. Rhetoritherapy refers to the development of appropriate communication behaviors through a goal-setting procedure in which students learn to establish reasonable goals, ascertain behavior indicative…