An unusual innovation that has been used at Dover Plains Environmental Education Center and which involves a scarecrow is described in this article on birdwatching. (JC)

Time sampled observations of non-elicited behaviors, obtained for several hundred newborn babies were used to determine (1) whether specific motor patterns are state linked in the manner of spontaneous behaviors; (2) whether certain behaviors appear with greater frequency preprandially; and (3) whether associations between behaviors and states are…

This paper provides an overview of Piaget's observations and notes that of 2337 individual observations in three of his early books, 89 percent cover the sensory motor period and the remaining 11 percent cover the range 2-11 years. (GO)

Review of experimental or quasi-experimental studies of the behavior of staff working with retarded persons resulted in 12 generalizations including the following: a disproportionate number of interactions occur with a relatively small number of clients; small teaching groups promote interactions; and structured settings promote more interactions.…

Studies of the susceptibility of observations of adult-child interactions to bias because of the physical attractiveness of target persons indicated that when making global ratings observers were significantly and favorably biased toward attractive women. No bias was obtained when observers used a molecular coding strategy. (RH)

Various indices for measuring agreement among several raters on the presence or absence of a trait can be interpreted as intraclass correlation coefficients. Such a reformulation clarifies the relationships among the measures, simplifies the computations involved, and permits simple significance tests to be carried out. An illustrative example is…

Autistic individuals were observed in their familiar residential environment using a time-sample technique. The data do not support the notion that autistic children are unusually "negativistic". (Author/NH)

This document is a tool to help teachers look at student work as a means to assess individual student progress. It contains work samples, accompanying commentaries, and assessment tools which originate from students and teachers in Philadelphia public schools who participated in the Philadelphia Education Fund's Small Learning Community…

Presents a questionnaire for the recording of teachers' observations of individual children. (AJ)

A brief description of a video tape sequence designed to satisfy training requirements for several types of observation scales. (AA)

Environment and behavior of disadvantaged rural families affect the growth and development of children. Specifically, infant punishment, rewarding behavior, sibling independence, health, housing, and working mothers are discussed. (This study was supported in part by a grant (RE: IF 4-NU-27,028-01) from the Div. of Nursing, HEW) (JF)