The activities in this guide are designed for students in grades 4-10 and are intended to stimulate thinking about scientific and engineering careers, develop logical reasoning and problem-solving skills, promote positive attitudes toward mathematics, increase interest and knowledge about scientific work, strengthen spatial visualization skills,…

Researchers of writing ability have often applied the developmental schemes of William Perry, Lev Vygotsky, and Jean Piaget in describing basic writers. As a result, some researchers have concluded that basic writers think well below the formal-operations or true concept-formation stage of cognitive development. To investigate the theory that…

The purpose of this report is to explore an analysis of discussions, among groups of elementary school children, of a social problem. The intent of the research is to contribute to the advancement of methods for program and student assessment, particularly toward goals not usually evaluated by traditional testing programs. The analysis method used…

This document presents a "Prospectus" in the schools of the 1990s by distinguished educators. These papers were commissioned to provide insight into the demands to be faced by educators in the 1990s and to spur dialogue and exchange among them. The monograph serves as a project resource in the current American Association of Colleges for Teacher…

The perceptions teachers have of students were studied using data from a large study of children, parents, and teachers. Teachers completed individual assessment questionnaires on each of 540 participating children from kindergarten and grades 1 and 3 who lived in middle-income districts of the suburbs of a large midwestern city and who…

Following the implementation of a matriculation plan at Rancho Santiago College (RSC), a study was conducted to examine the appropriateness of student course placement as assessed by faculty and students and to investigate faculty's perceptions of changes in students' skill level preparation over the past few years. Questionnaires were completed…

This is the second report on the evaluation of Project Giant Step, a program aiming to establish universal, comprehensive services to all 4-year-olds in New York, starting with low-income children in New York City who are not served by existing programs. The program combines an appropriate developmental and educational experience for children with…

Dichotomous search strategies (DSSs) for computerized adaptive testing are similar to golden section search strategies (GSSSs). Each middle point of successive search regions is a testing point. After each item is administered, the subject's obtained score is compared with the expected score at successive testing points. If the subject's obtained…

Information about how Graduate Record Examination (GRE) examinees solve verbal analogy problems was obtained in this study through protocol analysis. High- and low-ability subjects who had recently taken the GRE General Test were asked to "think aloud" as they worked through eight analogy items. These items varied factorially on the…

Although evidence is accumulating that the major reading difficulty dyslexics experience involves decoding and recognizing printed words, it is not clear that all dyslexics read poorly for the same reasons. A study investigated dyslexic children between 7 and 14 years of age to see if their reading errors and patterns of performance would enable…

A study examined (1) the relative contributions of skill in name retrieval and alphabetic mapping to the acquisition of skill in word identification, (2) the differential aspects of deficiencies in each of these processes on word identification, and (3) the differential effects of name familiarization and training in phonemic segmentation and…

This report describes the education of gifted and talented students in the Calgary (Alberta, Canada) Public Schools based on achievement information, classroom observation, and a survey of parents and teachers. Chapter 1 introduces the report, outlining recent changes in the gifted education program, controversy over the development of gifted…

Mathematical word problems are notoriously difficult to solve for students at all grade levels. Performance deficiencies have been attributed to students lacking abstract logico-mathematical knowledge or to insufficiently developed language comprehension skills. At least four general sources of difficulty can be distinguished in mathematical word…

As part of the American College Testing (ACT) High School Profile Service, national norms are provided to reflect the characteristics of students who took the ACT Assessment during their junior or senior years and graduated from high school in 1990. Four-year averages for ACT-tested graduates are illustrated. The tables of norms include: (1) mean…

This digest is adapted from Linda Cohen's publication, "Meeting the Needs of Gifted and Talented Minority Language Students." It explores the controversy surrounding the underrepresentation of minority language students in gifted and talented programs and makes recommendations for more suitable assessment techniques and program models.…