The possibility of developing a learning theory that is designed to insure its relevance to educational problems is discussed. It is suggested that the constitutive problem for an educational psychology of learning is how one learns things that are difficult to learn. Behaviorist learning theories fail almost entirely to explain why anything is…

The effects of trait anxiety (stable anxiety resulting from personality characteristics pre-disposing an individual to anxiety) and test difficulty on state anxiety (transitory anxiety resulting from situations regarded as difficult or dangerous) and test difficulty perception of 25 undergraduates were studied. The Test Anxiety Inventory was used…

To investigate the ability of young children to perceive the feelings of others, 44 preschool children with a mean age of approximately 3 years, 8 months were shown 12 vignettes in which a puppeteer emitting facial and vocal cues twice contrasted all possible pairs of happy, sad, angry, and afraid emotions. Mothers completed a questionniare…

The exercises described in this booklet comprise a physical fitness program of moderate intensity. Exercises are graded according to difficulty, and, in most cases, balanced to encompass physical fitness components essential to health, maintaining optimum body weight, and promoting efficient movement. Illustrations and descriptions are given of:…

Levels of independent variable(s) are often mixed within each block of trials rather than each level being presented in a separate block in research of various types. Two experiments involving tasks of a visual nature were conducted to demonstrate that such mixing can easily obscure the effects of principal interest. A target circle was projected…

A study of whether perceptual processes of children can be viewed within a structuralist frame of reference and whether the concept of the group of transformations and related notions can be used to formulate perceptual phenomena and to predict experimental results. (Author/CS)

Based on a paper presented at the American Educational Research Association Convention (Annual, Chicago, Illinois, February 8, 1968).

Procedures for conducting functional level testing have been available for use by practitioners for some time. However, the Title I Evaluation and Reporting System (TIERS), developed in response to the educational amendments of 1974 to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), has provided the impetus for widespread adoption of this…

Test scores that are not perfectly reliable cannot be strictly equated unless they are strictly parallel. This fact implies that tau equivalence can be lost if an equipercentile equating is applied to observed scores that are not strictly parallel. Thirty-six simulated data sets are produced to simulate equating tests with different difficulties…

An alternate-choice test item is a simple declarative sentence, one portion of which is given with two different wordings. For example, "Foundations like Ford and Carnegie tend to be (1) eager (2) hesitant to support innovative solutions to educational problems." The examinee's task is to choose the alternative that makes the sentence…

"Lasbarhetsindex" ("Lix") is a readability formula developed in Sweden that holds promise for assessing text difficulty in other languages, including English. So far three separate studies have been conducted to test Lix with French and English texts, with German and English texts, and with Greek and English texts. In all three…

This study explores the extent to which scores on four separate complex reasoning solution processes could predict performance on difficult problems. Definitions are provided for the four processes--intra-sentence processing, inter-sentence processing, ordering, and collecting--and previous work done in the field is outlined. The procedures used…

This study examines the development of children's preference for task difficulty levels. Subjects were 78 boys and 66 girls, aged 63 to 105 months. The sample was separated into older and younger groups. Within each age group, half the children of each sex were randomly assigned to one of two forms to test their level of aspiration. Subjects were…

The special case of the Piagetian model is discussed in relation to test theory. Problems connected with the construction and analysis of a test based on Piaget and Inhelder's The Child's Construction of Quantities are presented, and related to a method of representing the item discrimination which is consonant with Piagetian theory. Loevinger and…

To examine the effects of goal-setting on supervisors' evaluations of workers' performance, and on the causes attributed to that performance, 80 subjects were shown a simulated interaction between a worker and supervisor in one of three goal-setting conditions: self-set, participative, or assigned. The worker either succeeded or failed to meet the…