The article discusses three features of content area textbooks that make them relatively easy to read, understand, and learn from--structure, coherence, and audience appropriateness. For each feature, the article describes the research basis for the feature, outlines problems with existing textbooks, and presents suggestions for evaluating…

Investigates the nature of social concept development in young children. A heterogeneous sample of 64 kindergarten and 65 first grade public school students completed an assessment task for both basic concepts and social concepts. Grades, sex, and racial group had significant impact on performance. Important differences in difficulty among social…

The reading accuracy of seven-year-old children was found to be significantly better with the installment rather than the whole method of oral reading. In addition, word complexity, extraversion, and sex interacted in their effects on reading accuracy. The results are discussed in terms of their implication for classroom practice. (Author/RM)

Assesses the degree of difficulty parents attribute to specific socialization tasks; explores the relation between parents' perceived difficulty and children's perceived and actual competence in these two domains; and determines whether the ease or difficulty of these child rearing tasks, as perceived by parents, varies as a function of the…

An important aspect of Ontario's participation in the Second International Study of Mathematics was a comparative analysis of students' mathematics achievement from 1968 to 1982. Achievement levels remained remarkably constant. The problem of declining achievement in the United States was not apparent in this analysis of Ontario students. (LMO)

This study added extraneous information and increased syntactical complexity to determine the relative importance of computational and reading abilities in solving arithmetic word problems. Analyzing tests of 200 sixth graders indicated the combined abilities accounted for 54 percent of the variance in solution accuracy. (BS)

Describes a specific technique that involves initiative games to assess the level of group cooperation among children ages 11 to 13 in a school setting. Describes the development of initiative tasks used in the evaluation and the observation procedure used. (SB)

The indices of item difficulty and discrimination, the coefficients of effective length, and the average item information for both single- and multiple-answer items using six different scoring formulas were computed and compared. These formulas vary in terms of the assignment of partial credit and the correction for guessing. (Author/BW)

This is the fifth annual edition of the Brown Center Report on American Education. It analyzes the difficulty of items on the math portion of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), examines the content training of middle school math teachers, and evaluates the Blue Ribbon Schools Program. The NAEP assesses student performance…

This paper describes findings from two studies involving optional use of calculators on Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) mathematical items. The first study looked at the effects of calculator use on estimates of item difficulty. The second study looked at the effect of calculator use on equating results from an anchor test design. Study 1,…

The purpose of this study was to construct regression models that can identify sources of desired or undesired influences on student ratings. The approach uses course effectiveness findings developed with regression models to identify a possible solution to the two problems in using student ratings as a major component of course effectiveness: (1)…

A summary of some recent research on student evaluation of teaching is presented. Comment is made on the impact of the open admissions policy at City University of New York. The author theorizes that the more formal the use of student evaluations, the more rapidly will average grades drift upward and average level at which courses are taught drift…

Study investigated the effects of task difficulty on the paired-associate learning of retardates when extended elaboration conditions are employed. (Authors)