A short verbal aptitude test was administered under varying time limits with answer sheets specially designed to allow items that had been skipped to be identified. It appeared advantageous for the more able (based on grade point averages) but disadvantageous for the less able to skip items. (Author/RL)

The reliability and validity of a priori estimates of item characteristics are assessed. Results suggest that judges can make a modest contribution to estimation prior to actual administration. (Author/GK)

An analysis of descriptive and narrative passages written by 45 first-semester college freshmen early in the semester suggests that mean T-unit length is not a stable individual trait either within the descriptive mode or across description and narration. (GT)

Experiments conducted with freshman composition students suggested that (1) the repeated use of a control stimulus passage does not result in increased syntactic complexity; (2) both overt and covert cues elicit more complex writing than do no-cue situations; and (3) the effect of overt cues seems to be retained, at least across a short duration.…

Describes a technique devised to isolate topics of high perceived difficulty in a school biology syllabus. Discusses results obtained from questioning school pupils, teachers, and university students. (Author/CS)

Referential communication skills of moderately mentally retarded adolescents (20 speaker/listener dyads with a mean age of 15.75 years) were investigated. In Study 1, S performance on referential communication activities (divided into three skill levels) was examined. Degree of idiosyncratic messages communicated was investigated in Study 2.…

Robust interference effects were found which declined with age. Manipulating discriminability of the relevant stimulus dimension resulted in large changes in sorting time, but interference effects did not vary with baseline difficulty. These results were interpreted as strongly supporting both an absolute decrement model and a developmental trend…

Explores variables influencing the cognitive emphasis of teachers' examinations. Examination questions from Nigerian secondary school science teachers were analyzed according to Bloom's Taxonomy. The influence of the following variables on levels of questions was investigated: teachers' educational backgrounds, subjects taught, grade level taught,…

Four age groups between 7 and 15 listened to a prose passage delivered at a slow or fast speech rate and structured to join or separate related pieces of information. A recall test followed immediately. Performance was correlated to subjects' age and sex. Implications for classroom teaching are considered. (Author/SJL)

White and Gagne's method (EJ 180 555) for formatively evaluating learning hierarchies does not require participants to be taught the content prior to testing them for their knowledge of the skills in the hierarchy. By simply determining the percentage of students achieving each skill, the researcher obtains approximately the same information.…

Phonemic awareness tasks are identified: sound-to-word matching, word-to-word matching, rhyme recognition, isolation segmentation, counting sounds, blending, deletion, and substitution. Methods for teaching segmentation and blending, the most cortical tasks, are discussed. (Author/CP)

Five indices are discussed that should logically discriminate between situations in which: (1) the linear equating method (LEM) adequately adjusts for difference between score distributions of two approximately parallel test forms; or (2) a method more complex than the linear equating method is needed. (RL)

The computational difficulty of the word problem sections of eight standardized achievement tests was analyzed with respect to the variety of computational procedures and the number of digits per whole number computation. Analysis reveals considerable variation among the current tests in terms of computational procedure and difficulty. (Author/MK)

The relationship between students' study processes and the structural complexity of their learning is examined. Study processes are viewed in terms of three dimensions and are assessed by a questionnaire. Learning quality is expressed in levels of a taxonomy. A study that relates taxonomic levels and retention to study processes is reported.…

Three problem-solving strategies--working backward from the unknown, forward from the given, and mixed--were applied to interrelated algebra equations. The mixed strategy was most popular and most efficient with grouped variables. Memory load or information-processing load differences among the strategies were evident. (CP)