Addresses a number of ethical and methodological issues related to research involving vulnerable populations such as the frail elderly, when the research design calls for a control or nonintervention group. Techniques are presented for building a "limited" service component into the research design. (Author)

Thirty medical students at the University of Otago were randomly chosen to learn clinical biochemistry by the Keller Plan. The rest of the class acted as controls. The randomly selected Keller group scored significantly higher than the control group on a practice/review test and the final examination. (Author/MLW)

Results indicate that subjects scored better when tested by an experimenter of the opposite sex and also that there is some tendency for experimenters to receive scores from their subjects in accordance with their expectations of the subject's performance. (JD)

Extends previous research on the relative effects of input processing and output processing on the use of Spanish clitic pronouns. Results of a repeated measures analysis of variance reveal that input and output processing students significantly explored their scores on various comprehension tests compared to a control group. (35 references)…

Investigates the relationship between social-behavioral competence and behavior disorders among preschoolers in a Head Start program. Results indicate that children identified as externalizers and internalizers are clearly different from those in the control group on a range of adjustment measures. (Author/BB)

Results with 72 graduate students in statistics assigned to self-monitoring, instructor-monitoring, and control groups indicated that the self-monitoring group performed better on course tests, used more self-regulated learning strategies, and developed better knowledge representation of the course content than the other two groups. (SLD)

Within-class experimental designs are subject to diffusion effects whereby both experimental and control students benefit from the intervention, thereby contaminating the control group and biasing evaluations of intervention effects. In support of diffusion effects, this study showed that a classroom intervention resulted in higher academic…

The impact of premature birth on associative learning was evaluated using simple delay eyeblink conditioning in which a tone conditional stimulus was paired with an air puff unconditional stimulus. Fourteen preterm (28-31 weeks gestation) and 11 full-term infants completed at least 3 conditioning sessions, 1 week apart, at 5 months of age…

Adaptive Hypermedia Systems can be developed to accommodate a variety of individual differences, including learning style and cognitive style. This study investigates the hypothesis that adaptive hypermedia accommodating cognitive styles can be beneficial for the observed learning outcomes. A prototype system, designed to be adapted to individual…

Adults naturally comment and pose questions during joint book reading (JBR), a recognized context for vocabulary acquisition. An original story containing 10 nonsense words mapped to novel referents was read to 40 typically developing preschoolers. Children who heard scripted questions and comments identified approximately two more words than…

This paper focuses on two increasingly important issues in teacher education: the design of more skill-based education and the involvement of students by means of peer assessment. Ninety-three student teachers were trained in one important peer-assessment skill, namely 'defining performance criteria'. This training, which consisted of four…

This study investigates the effect of CMC participation on language learners' willingness to learn more about the target culture through study abroad. Also, it seeks to discern whether CMC activities improve language learners' self-perception that they have learned more about the target culture. An experimental group of 23 U.S. university students…

Eighteen parents participated in a Deliberate Psychological Education program designed to enhance their moral judgement and indirectly influence the moral development of their children. In a quasi-experimental nonequivalent control group design, their progress was compared to that of 19 participants in a no-treatment control condition. There was a…

Seventy 8th-grade students (including talented writers, those with average ability, and students in need of special education services) participated in an integrated social studies and language arts unit designed to promote historical understandings and argumentative writing skills. The historical reasoning instruction lasted 12 days, and the…

This study investigates the effect of a training course, based on constructivism, on the student teachers' perceptions of teaching, learning and the roles of teachers and students in the teaching-learning process. A sample of 188 student teachers (92 of them in the experimental group and 96 in the control group) from the Hashemite University were…