Findings of this study of the managerial behavior of special education principals are compared with findings of other studies of managerial behavior of elementary and secondary principals. Mintzberg's theoretical model of administrative behavior (1973) was applied to special education principals. Five structured observations were conducted with…

The study assesses impacts of population growth and migration status on academic performance and participation of 1,743 white high school seniors from primarily nonmetropolitan areas of Utah. Data from a survey of the state's 1980 graduating seniors are employed in the analysis. Indicators of academic performance are the number of organizations in…

A task was developed to differentiate the reasoning of elementary school students in fifth, sixth, and seventh grades. Subjects completed 16 matrices containing two, three, or four dimensions and varying in the embeddedness of the dimensions. They also solved a formal operational task assessing ability to isolate, exclude, and include variables.…

The structure of incentives and disincentives for student effort in school, and how this structure may be modified by educational reform, were investigated using data from the High School and Beyond (HS&B) survey. A framework was designed which blends sociologists' focus on school organization and educational stratification with economists'…

According to the classical working memory perspective, tasks such as command and control decision-making should be performed less effectively if extraneous material must be retained in short-term memory. Only marginal support for this prediction was obtained for a simulation involving scheduling trucking and transportation missions, although…

The paper presents observations of families having adult members with learning disabilities and describes a residential program to facilitate the transition to independent living of lower functioning learning disabled young adults. The program, called Independence Center, involves placing participants in apartments with roommates and helping them…

Considerable research has documented the positive effect of teacher expressiveness and warmth on students' evaluations of college teachers, but the effect of teacher expressiveness on student performance is less clear. To investigate the interaction between teacher expressiveness, teacher sex, and student sex, 121 college students viewed a…

Typical learned helplessness research has involved the presentation of non-contingent, aversive events followed by measures of performance on subsequent tasks; recent investigations have focused on the effect of non-contingent rewards. To examine the effects of non-contingent rewards on children, two studies were conducted, in which children were…

This experiment tested the hypothesis that the sequence of ability and effort attributional feedback influences children's attributions, self-efficacy, and skillful performance. Children deficient in subtraction skills received training on subtraction operations and solved problems over four sessions. During the problem solving, some children…

Gagne proposed in his learning hierarchy model that a final task could not be performed by an individual who does not have the subordinate skills, and that any superordinate task involved in the hierarchy of skill building could be performed by an individual provided suitable instructions were given, and provided the relevant subordinate knowledge…

The Achievement Based Curriculum (ABC) is a process for training teachers how to plan, assess, prescribe, teach, and evaluate instruction for all children. Project I CAN is a research database designed and organized to be used by physical educators and classroom teachers. The materials cover the scope (preprimary through secondary) and essential…

The role of content in formal operations tasks was explored in research that systematically varied the content of tasks and children's performance by developmental level and socioeconomic status (SES). Subjects were 110 Icelandic 12-year-olds who had entered a longitudinal study when they were 7 years old. Two extreme ability groups of children…

This research brief reviews selected 1986 publications concerning the effects of class size on student achievement, attitudes, and behavior. The following points are made: (1) smaller classes in the lower grades have a positive effect on student learning attitudes and behavior; (2) minority, disadvantaged, and low-achieving students perform better…

Samples of 17 male and 31 female first graders, 26 male and 22 female third graders, 23 male and 25 female fifth graders, 21 male and 27 female ninth graders, and 18 male and 30 female college students predicted their ability to recall sets of items that varied in number of items presented and presence or absence of categorization. The aim was to…

This study was conducted to relate personal, cognitive, and school variables to physics achievement. The sample consisted of 435 students participating in the 1985 Mississippi State University Annual Physics Competition. The Student Background Questionnaire was planned and developed to collect information on each variable examined. The predictor…