The counseling of parents of underachievers appears to be a logical and productive way to proceed with underachieving elementary school pupils. The success of the method is, however, related to the quality of participation by the parents." (Author)

Results indicated that children exposed to the aggressive program engaged in longer attacks against an ostensible child victim than subjects exposed to the nonaggressive program. (Authors)

Presents evidence suggesting that the difference between stuttering and normal nonfluency in young children is one of degree only. It hypothesizes that heavy pressure on the child to speak well increases nonfluency. Bibliography. (RW)

The use of analysis of variance was examined under the assumption that the treatment had been randomly assigned to students, when in fact, the class had been the unit. Data support the idea that if one can randomly assign treatments to intact classes, consideration should certainly be given to doing so. (Author/GK)

Discussed problems and deficiencies in past research on clinical diagnosis, pertaining to sampling problems with regard to clinical subjects studied, adequacy of control groups, base rates, clinical versus statistical significance, lack of cross-validation, and problems due to reliance on inadequate schemes of classification. Future research is…

An 18-week course on death and dying designed specifically for high school students significantly reduced participants' level of death anxiety. These results conflict with previous research on adolescents in which either increased anxiety or no significant differences in death anxiety were reported as a result of death education. (CM)

Is it ethical to select clients at random for a beneficial social service, then deny the benefits to a control group for the sake of science? Participation of control groups in planning, implementation and evaluation of social programs may resolve ethical issues. (Author/CP)

The effects of task-overlapping linguistic noise on activity and performance of hyperactive and control children were assessed. Results suggest that task difficulty may play a role in the effects of overlapping stimulation on both groups. (Author/GK)

Human relations development techniques, espoused by Carkhuff, fail to rest upon a sound empirical base, well illustrated by the research study reported by Wiggins. Comments aim at refuting the Wiggin's claim that his findings validate the Carkhuff paradigm as an effective model. (Author/BEF)

Recognition of radio and television antismoking messages was measured in 6 treatment and 4 control cities. A survey of 574 adolescents found high recognition of messages even in areas where they were not broadcast, reinforcing the need for true control groups and distinctive messages to ensure validity in mass media evaluation. (SK)

An evaluation of one therapeutic service offered to sexually abused children in the United Kingdom exposed the methodological issue of false negatives among the comparison group, suggesting that researchers cannot assume that nonreferred comparison subjects have not actually experienced sexual abuse. (DB)

Explores issues in evaluating exemplary programs, including the measurement of the degree to which the program is exemplary or promising. Suggests that comparison (control) group analysis can mislead researchers about the effectiveness of a program and suggests the use of gain scores to identify exemplary programs. (SLD)

Several recent studies are identified that used expert ratings of the job performance of certified professionals as a validation criterion. These studies showed a strong relationship between expert ratings and certification, but were susceptible to alternative interpretations due to design constraints. Inclusion of control constructs is presented…

Outlines some nonrandomized constructed comparison strategies that can be used to evaluate interventions for children and illustrates their use for outcome variables that would be expected to change over age if no treatment were given. The proposed strategy consists of determining an expected age function for the dependent variable using pretest…

Describes a method that uses program participants' compliance with program instructions as a means of classifying participants and in that way obtains a randomized control group for a subset of participants. Illustrates two variations of the method through a large smoking-intervention project. (SLD)