This study examines the reasons for cancellations of the newspaper, who makes the decision to stop the newspaper in each household, why the subscriber initiated service and who makes this decision, and why people read a newspaper. The sites selected for this study were Evansville, Indiana ("Evansville Press"), Raleigh, North Carolina…

This report, the fifth in a series of six reports on television advertising and children, describes the key content dimensions of network advertising messages presented on two comparable Saturday mornings in 1972 and 1973. A total of 470 advertisements was systematically and quantitatively analyzed along 28 variables involving the nature of…

This paper suggests a sequence of requisite skills for the identification of main ideas including identifying the key words or topic of a sentence, identifying the key words or topic of a paragraph, identifying the topic sentence of a paragraph, recognizing an explicitly stated main idea of a paragraph, recalling an explicitly stated main idea,…

This paper discusses the history and effect of popular culture generally and of the adolescent formula novel specifically. Seven primary characteristics of art as popular culture are that the work is accessible, easy to understand, conventional in form, not shocking in content, expressive of common and appropriate values, relative to some element…

This 5 to 9 week unit on television is designed to help secondary students develop discrimination in choice of programs, put televiewing in its proper perspective among their daily activities, and communicate their reactions to stations and producers. Discussion questions, teacher background information, lists of television terms and hand signals,…

This study had two aims: (1) to determine whether there were significant differences in the syntax of college freshmen compositions of different overall quality, and (2) to determine whether certain syntactic indexes of writing maturity functioned as indexes of the quality of freshman writing. Two writing samples were elicited from 99 freshmen at…

The content of teacher rating scales was investigated in a recently completed survey of the nation's 60 largest school districts. Of the 53 responding districts, 50 indicated that they are currently using some type of rating scale to measure teacher performance. Districts reported the purpose and type of scale being used, the frequency of rating,…

This report reviews the image portrayed of the Negro, in textbooks used in the deep South. Slavery is painted as a cordial, humane system under kindly masters and the Negro as docile and childlike. Although the treatment of the modern era is relatively more objective, the texts, on the whole, evade treatment of the Civil Rights struggle, violence,…

Reported is a study of questioning techniques used in inquiry training. Particular attention was focused on Suchman's method for teaching scientific inquiry and on his claim to confer on elementary school students some knowledge of, or competence in, inquiry. Suchman's eleven questioning categories were examined to establish the criteria for each.…

Techniques were developed for designing instruction for discipline-based curriculum areas. The approach integrated aspects of previous work in behavioral objectives, the structure of knowledge, learning hierarchies, and information-processing psychology and made explicit their relations to instructional design. Three kinds of analysis were…

Two purposes prompted this study: to determine the growth and development of children's books about Mexico and Mexican-Americans in terms of content, illustrations, and format, and to determine whether there has been a change in the image of Mexico that is portrayed in these books. A total of 661 children's books were examined to determine the…

This paper identifies and describes three distinct variables on which prose passages can differ, from a linguistic point of view. Each of these variables relates to the way in which the content of prose is organized to convey meaning to the reader. The first variable is the position of information in a structure representing a passage's…

Four eighth grade literature anthologies ("Focus,""Counterpoint,""Perception," and "Adventures for Readers") were analyzed to determine what roles women played in adolescent literature anthologies. Out of the 171 selections analyzed, only 24 had female authors. Selections which contained no female characters, depicted women in a negative view, or…

Developing a rationale for the high school underground press is the objective of this study. To accomplish this, principals, underground editors, and student editors were asked to rate six concepts and to complete an attitudes and beliefs scale, and thirteen high school underground newspapers and five major court decisions were examined using…

This volume is intended to help teachers recognize the criteria for evaluating books and to assist the learners in their classrooms in developing skills. The book is divided into three sections. The first presents an overview of literary criticism with chapters entitled "Critic, Fact, Fiction" and "The Writer and His Craft." The second section…