Both criterion-referenced testing and behavioral assessment share the basic assumption that test behavior is a sample rather than a sign. In addition, both types of assessment focus on response capabilities and performance in specified content domains. Although content validity has been traditionally recognized as essential to criterion-referenced…

Based on the assumption that the content and symbolism of nursery rhymes reflect the particular needs of those who respond to them, this paper analyzes Mother Goose rhymes in relation to the psychological stages of child development. Each basic need of the child, as defined in Bruno Bettelheim's "The Uses of Enchantment," is applied to…

The major purpose of this thesis was to show that it is possible to develop a theoretically sound and empirically based rationale for determining the systematic introduction and use of vocabulary in middle-grade reading instructional material. A major portion of the research for this thesis consisted of a content analysis of six current reading…

This study compared the techniques used by college English teachers in their classrooms with the comments of subject experts concerning the value of these methods. In order to assess the frequency of teachers' use of specific techniques, a job analysis questionnaire consisting of 29 items was given to 15 faculty members and 15 doctoral students in…

This study measured the thoroughness of reported research which appeared in seven journals in the health education field. Evaluation was made of articles, appearing between May 1980 and May 1981, in the "Journal of the American College Health Association,""American Journal of Public Health,""Health Education Quarterly,""Health Values: Achieving…

To determine the number of distinct words in printed school English, a study analyzed a 7,260 word sample from the "Word Frequency Book" prepared by J. B. Carroll, P. Davies, and B. Richman. Projecting from the sample to the total vocabulary of school English, the best estimate was that it contained about 88,500 distinct words. Furthermore, for…

A study was conducted to discover differences in foreign affairs news coverage in newspapers from countries with differing concepts of the role of the press. The study used data gathered in a content analysis of newspapers from 16 countries and the findings of an independent assessment of the relative freedom of press systems in those countries.…

This paper addresses the following problem: how do power relationships constrain what counts as knowledge in social studies education and thus constitute the field? By looking at speech acts performed in a given socio-linguistic community one can get insight into discursive practices of that community. The present concern is with power relations…

A study was conducted to determine if the "New Realism" in adolescent literature provided a more realistic picture of the psychological and social characteristics of adolescents than did earlier forms of the genre. An analysis was conducted of five novels written before 1960 and five written after that date to determine themes of identity and the…

To explore androcentric bias in the "Educational Administration Quarterly" (EAQ), researchers performed a content analysis of 90 articles from ten volumes of the EAQ (1970-1979). An initial demographic analysis of the articles looked at the author's gender, article focus, and use of sexist language. The researchers then examined five…

Client-therapist verbal interaction in content analysis research has just begun to be defined. Reciprocal Category Analysis (RCA) is used to measure therapeutic interactions between client and therapist. Three experienced therapists from each of the schools of client-centered, Rational Emotive (RET), Transactional Analysis (TA), and Gestalt…

Subjects 9 to 15 years old were divided into four age levels by 18-month increments to compare learning disabled and normal students on indexes of both oral and written language. Four questions guided the inquiry: (1) Does the syntactic development of oral language differ at the age levels measured? (2) What is the trend of syntactic development…

The purpose of this study is to describe a positive supervisory experience from the supervisor's point of view. Four field interviews with supervisors responsible for training and evaluating professionals were subjected to phenomenological content analysis. Unlike the methods of experimental science, phenomenological analysis seeks to determine…

The Nancy Drew adventure series, a classic girls' favorite for over 50 years, offers less sex role stereotyping and sexist cultural indoctrination than the majority of reading textbooks now used in the elementary school classroom. Textbooks were excluded from the Title IX regulations of the 1972 Education Amendments, and a review of studies…

The study described in this paper examined certain personality factors and dispositions characteristic of two types of inner city black high school students: those who achieve and those who fail to achieve. Interviews with eight black students from a ghetto high school in Chicago were analyzed. This analysis revealed six dichotomies which seemed…