This document contains one of two assessment tools developed by Proect Proud Option, which developed and field-tested a set of student- and job-assessment instruments that provide a strategy for determining (1) the vocational skills required on a particular job; (2) the functional skill levels of a particular student; (3) a process to determine…

The development of alternative instructional activities for use in the basic writing classroom and a description and analysis of four levels of basic writing are the results of a study of basic writing teaching techniques. The linguistic concepts of immediate and transferred utterances and nominal-verbal pairing, and the work of L. Vygotsky on…

The reliability of multiple choice tests--containing different numbers of response options--was investigated for 260 students enrolled in technical college economics courses. Four test forms, constructed from previously used four-option items, were administered, consisting of (1) 60 two-option items--two distractors randomly discarded; (2) 40…

The feasibility of generating multiple-choice test questions by transforming sentences from prose instructional materials was examined. A computer-based algorithm was used to analyze prose subject matter and to identify high-information words. Sentences containing selected words were then transformed into multiple-choice items by four writers who…

Test items, all referencing the same instructional objective, are not equally difficult. This investigation attempts to identify some of the determinants of item difficulty within the context of a first course in educational statistics. Computer generated variations of items were used to provide the data. The results were used to investigate the…

A study was conducted to analyze and compare the job performance of civil service and military pavements maintenance workers and construction equipment operators. A military sample of 2,675 and a civilian sample of 1,974 were surveyed by means of a job inventory checklist and relative time spent rating method. Of the three job types that were…

The feasibility of inferring relative task difficulty values and relative task aptitude requirements for a variety of tasks in the General and Administrative work areas is discussed. It was established that there was a high positive relationship between relative task difficulty values, as designated by work supervisors, and the corresponding…

This study sought to determine if there is a change in information processing and channel capacity as the human organism grows older, and if this relationship is altered with a change in stimulus complexity and dimensionality of the stimulus presented. With the human organism considered as a communication system, the use of absolute judgments to…

The fleet performance of a small group of Project 100,000 (low aptitude) personnel was assessed by means of an evaluation form completed by their supervisors after the men had been on board for approximately seven months. The men had previously been trained for the Navy rating, Aviation Structural Mechanic S (Structures), AMS. The performance of…

A mathematical model for computer-aided instruction has been developed. The assumption is made that the course is divided into a hierarchy of levels of difficulty and that if a student is able to perform successfully at a given level of difficulty, he can also perform successfully at all levels of lesser difficulty. Furthermore, if a student…

This study developed prototype diagnostic and teaching materials to test logical reasoning ability in second, third, and fourth grade pupils. The testing procedure attempted to find the most difficult levels, along several dimensions, at which a child can use a logical rule. The materials dealt with the rule for "or" elimination and the rule for…

Nine moderately/severely retarded adolescents and young adults were trained to use coin-operated washing machines using three types of materials: artificial (pictures), simulated (cardboard replicas), and natural (realistic). Most students increased their laundry performance with all three sets of school-based material, but generalization to…

Samples of the communicative behavior of a group of mildly mentally retarded adults were examined for indications of mature linguistic competence (specifically, grammatical morpheme and complex sentence use).Findings confirmed the expectation that the eventual mastery of these aspects of linguistic competence in higher-level retarded individuals…

Investigation of the simultaneous effects of and interaction between both culture-specific content schemata and formal schemata on English as a second language reading comprehension revealed that familiar content and rhetorical form yielded good reading comprehension. Results for "mixed" conditions indicated that content schemata affected reading…

Suggests that, in the majority of the aspects of the reading process examined, there was a statistically significant interaction between illustration and difficulty levels. Finds that reading performance in the illustrated conditions was superior to that in the unillustrated conditions at the lower level of difficulty. (JD)