An operational instrument was designed to approach the tasks of curricular planning and design of university programs in communication in Mexico, or elsewhere in the Third World. The instrument was designed by the Mexican team of advisors at the Workshop-Seminar on Curriculum Planning, held in Villa de Leyva, Colombia, in May of 1987. It was used…

The 1988 presidential campaign provoked a flurry of popular press criticism directed at the heavy use by television news of short "sound bites" from candidates. A study examined the following questions: (1) Has the number of sound bites in network evening newscasts increased over the past 20 years? (2) Has the length of the average sound…

A rhetorical analysis of the 1984 vice-presidential debate between George Bush and Geraldine Ferraro was conducted to determine argumentation tactics, argumentation flaws, reasoning strategies, and other rhetorical characteristics. The results indicated that the format of the debate allowed for little actual direct confrontation between…

Throughout most of the 1970s, the two major competing syndicated services measuring consumer magazine audiences utilized different methodologies in gathering magazine audience measurements and released somewhat differing figures. A study was conducted to explore the historical developments of W.R. Simmons and Associates Research, Inc. (Simmons),…

Based on an examination of 90 books and journal articles, this paper provides an analysis of the interpretations historians have used in explaining American journalism during the national crises of 1917-1945 (World War I, the Depression, and World War II). The paper concludes that, in general, the historians defined three divergent approaches to…

A study was conducted to compare coverage of the United States invasion of Grenada provided by the Third World news agency Inter Press Service (IPS) during October and November 1984, with that provided by the "New York Times." The study instrument tested the direction, themes, sources quoted, and location of the stories. The theme…

All of the presidential and vice presidential campaign stories in a simple random sample of 75 network television newscasts during the 1984 campaign were analyzed for possible political bias. The 4,363 sentences in these newscasts were classified as report sentences (factual and verifiable), inference sentences (subjective and not verifiable), and…

A study of political news during two four-year periods found reporting changed in response to shifts in relations between Turkey and the United States. (RB)

This report analyzes the articles published in "Research in the Teaching of English" during the first ten years of publication, a period that represents the influence of two editors. Among the findings were that studies related to composition have been most numerous, followed by studies related to language. Studies related to literature have been…

Syntax in four published series of elementary school readers was analyzed to discover patterns of complexity increasing from first to sixth grade, to identify structures accounting for differences across the grades, and to compare the frequency of specific structures among the series. Analyses of 16 surface structures representing complexities…

Communication scholars traditionally have assumed that children have only limited exposure to politically relevant information. This study attempts to assess the validity of this assumption by comparing the content of two sources generally available to United States school children: The "Weekly Reader" and television news. For two…

Meant as a reference and guide to critical evaluation of the way issues are treated in children's books, each of the nine chapters in this book can be used independently. Each chapter contains a discussion of an issue, a section that relates how particular books handle that issue, at least two suggestions for activities that teachers can use to…

The rhetorical aspects of psychotherapeutic theory may be examined by arranging the canons of rhetoric, the sources of persuasion, and some procedures of rhetorical behavior on one axis of a grid, then placing rhetorical/therapeutic situations on the other axis of the grid. In this way, the degree to which a rhetoric is used in psychotherapeutic…

The appropriateness of the National Board of Medical Examiners Part I examination was determined as an internal evaluation of second year students at a midwestern medical school. Review of the June 1974 examination by 37 faculty revealed that 85 percent of the items reflected the content of the second year curriculum with information necessary to…