This report describes research into the effectiveness of the language laboratory in improving students' reading, listening and speaking skills in secondary school language programs. The experiment, involving some 5,000 students in 21 school districts of the Metropolitan School Study Council, was restricted to students of French. Student…

A summary of the purpose of the project, a discussion of experiment design, some statistical analysis of test results, and implications are included in this article. Attempting to determine which of three audio-assistance systems--the audio-active, audio-record language laboratory, or the classroom tape recorder--is most effective in foreign…

The increasing use of educational performance or outcome measurements for a range of policy purposes points to new procedures for adjusting data for population composition. The purposes include: program formulation, budget resource allocation, grant-in-aid designs, performance incentive payments, consumer information for school selection, and…

This document reports on a project undertaken to determine the feasibility of a periodic national survey of a sample of U.S. school districts to obtain information on the performance of the existing dissemination and utilization network for educational innovations. All the cases in this volume were originally identified from a national survey of…

A consensus has prevailed among educators that Americans of verying ethnic, social, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds who must communicate with each other in social, academic, and occupational situations might achieve a greater degree of rapport if the dialect of the English mutually spoken and the speech mannerisms used were standardized.…

Designed to explore the determinants and long-range consequences of individual mobility in the U.S., the Explorations in Equality of Opportunity Project is a longitudinal survey of 2,077 students who were tested by the Educational Testing Service (ETS) as sophomores in 42 public high schools in 1955 and who were followed up by the Institute for…

Many programs for individualization of instruction are based on a curriculum structure involving a careful sequencing of instructional objectives and larger units of learning content. A methodology that may be useful in the formative evaluation of the sequential and structural properties among predefined curriculum units and specific instructional…

An evaluation of the first year of "The Electric Company" is provided. Volume 1 is comprised of the following chapters: I. Introduction; II. Preparing for the Evaluation (Research Design and Sampling Procedures; Field Operations; The Treatment--the in-school viewing treatment, the at-home viewing treatment, and the content of The…

The results of a critical survey of research on educational effectiveness, performed to assess the current state of knowledge regarding the determinants of educational outcomes, are reported. An input-output approach was used to analyze the relationship between the amounts of various resources provided to students and the educational outcomes.…

"Excessive" noise outburst behavior of 24 second graders was effectively controlled under automated stimulus conditions. A voice operated relay transmitted signals to an automated combination light display and outburst time/total running time meters; under 2 conditions, the light display functioned first as a primary, then as a secondary…

An inquiry into methods of assessing the ability of non-English speaking children, conducted with the aim of devising new tests which can be used to assess the abilities of children from a different cultural background and with a poor knowledge of English, is discussed in this book. Cross-cultural tests which are essential in a multi-racial…

This paper describes the development of the Survey of Pupil Opinion, an attitude-assessment instrument adapted to the reading and "palatability" levels of high school students in compensatory programs. An initial pool of 100 items assumed to reflect "attitude toward school" was reduced to a 30-item instrument. Results revealed that, for each of…

This research bulletin includes reports of research in progress or recently completed from March 1976 through August 1976. Each entry includes information concerning the investigators, purpose, subjects, methods, duration, cooperating groups, and findings (if available). The reports are listed under several topical headings: (1) Long-Term…

A return to basic inductive research methods is recommended. Specifically, the scientific method of "strong inference" ought to be applied in attempts to prove hypotheses concerning the relationship that may exist between attitude variables and the learning of a second or foreign language. These hypotheses, drawn from the literature and discussed…

The heart of performance- and competency-based teacher education, evaluation, and accountability programs is the establishment of empirical relationships between teacher behavior as an independent variable and student achievement as a dependent variable. Before researchers can adequately establish those relationships they need to deal with the…