The usefulness of studying thought processes in the construct validation of ability tests was examined using a sample consisting of 343 Canadian senior high school students. Four levels of probing were used by the interviewer to examine the students' thinking processes while taking the Test on Appraising Observations: (1) think aloud; (2)…

A survey administered to junior and senior high school students was studied to determine the degree to which the narrative from the "additional comments" section of the survey enhances the quantitative data analysis from the survey. The data, obtained as part of a needs assessment for a suburban school district, were obtained by using…

This report describes a preliminary methodology by which distressed communities may be identified using school districts as the basic unit for the presentation of data. Distress consists of a concentration of the following types of need: (1) economic; (2) social; and (3) educational. Distress was measured by an index that determined a district's…

Student papers presented at a sociolinguistics conference include: "La variation phonologique [d'une voyelle] a Hull"; "La force illocutoire des pronoms personnels 'je' et 'tu' en tant qu'insignes des places d'ou parlent les femmes et les hommes"; "L'emploi des modes indicatif et subjonctif dans le francais parle de la…

Image assessment in higher education and procedures for conducting image assessments are discussed. Image assessment is the process of finding out what others think about an organization. It is proposed that when image assessments are approached objectively, the results can help determine constituent needs, anticipate vocational trends, survey…

A study examined the effects of teachers' use of explicit explanation on students' levels of metacognitive awareness of the reading process and on their reading achievement as measured by a standardized test. Subjects, 22 fifth grade teachers from 13 different elementary schools, were observed by researchers who had been trained in using a…

Sixteen third grade students, 16 college students, and 16 older adults performed a lexical decision (word-nonword) task to determine age-related differences in the magnitude of contextual priming effects. Context length and target quality (intact versus degraded) were within subject manipulations. A significant Age X Context Length X…

Collaborative strategies were used for the conduct of research on two topics: preservice teacher education for elementary school teachers, and preservice and inservice education for secondary school mathematics teachers. The collaborative arrangements were the same for both projects, but the tasks differed. The intent of the elementary school…

This paper describes the roles that women have played in the public schools of the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries and analyzes changes in their status and level of participation during this period. After an introductory section addressing the purposes of the international symposium at which the paper was read, the second section…

The purposes of this study were to investigate the interrelatedness of several measures of social competence and to determine a valid and practical combination of procedures for assessing social competence in school or clinic settings. A total of 51 sixth-grade children (23 boys and 28 girls) were administered the following measures of social…

The focus of this study was on the relationship between visual and statistical analyses of time series data and the degree to which characteristics of the data influenced this relationship. A total of 52 teachers took part in evaluating a series of graphs having prespecified characteristics. The independent variables manipulated included: slope,…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 13 titles deal with the following topics: (1) maximum likelihood multivariate statistical analysis in human communication research; (2) sense, expression, and purpose in Alexander Campbell's natural philosophy of rhetoric; (3)…

This volume is the first of two in a report on a state-of-the-art assessment which was conducted to determine the roles of school, academic, special, and community libraries in creating and/or providing viewtext information services; the information resources now available or expected to be available in the future to a sample of libraries in the…

This book collects articles that examine the patterns of dropping out evident among American youth, and the policies developed and implemented to reduce the incidence of dropping out. The following chapters (and their authors) are included: (1) Introduction (G. Natriello); (2) Can We Help Dropouts? Thinking about the Undoable (D. Mann); (3) Large…

This guide is intended for use in teaching a capstone course in technology education at the 12th-grade level. The course is designed to lead students through a formal hands-on study of the research process as it is applied to development operations in an industrial setting. The first two sections discuss the guide's development within the…