The purpose of this study was to construct and validate a self-rating scale which can be easily administered and quickly scored for discriminating between those high school students who will dropout and those who will not. A 34-item scale was constructed for subjects with a fifth grade reading level. This scale was administered to 113 high school…

In studies of classroom behavior modification, the experimenter or educator attempts to make valid judgments about desirable behavioral outcomes. Instruments of assessment to be used with behavior modification treatments must be sensitive to the behavioral goals of principals, teachers, and public school officials. Moreover the treatments used in…

The following problems in the field of essay grading have persisted: (1) low reliability of grading, (2) deciding upon elements or variables to consider, and (3) deciding on the weight to assign to each variable. Described are two aspects of a study on essay grading at the high school level in Alberta, Canada: (1) the reliability of scoring…

Mothers of cleft and noncleft palate children (C- and non C-mothers) listened to a reading by a cleft palate child of a passage containing specified combinations of nasality and intelligibility. Groups were either uninstructed or instructed to listed to the content or the manner of speech; they assessed the nasality and intelligibility of the…

This social studies unit uses conflicting eyewitness and secondary accounts of what happened in Lexington, Massachusetts, on April 19, 1775, to illustrate the nature and methods of history and to encourage the student to function as an historian. Sections of the unit (1) introduce problems faced by historians by focusing on documentary materials…

The objectives of the annual survey of hearing impaired children and youth which are presented are to collect, process, and disseminate statistical information on characteristics of all hearing impaired individuals through college age. One aspect of this work is described through results of the administration of the Stanford Achievement Tests…

An overall look is taken at the cloze research method as a new tool for measuring readability. The construction of a cloze readability test is described as well as several studies made on the reliability and validity of such tests. Included also are some methodological considerations to be kept in mind when constructing a cloze test. Data is…

This report describes Head Start classroom activity, contains data on the children from a testing program, and includes teacher ratings of pupils on a Classroom Adjustment Checklist. (Individual data is being preserved for follow-up studies.) Classroom observations were made in 13 of 27 Head Start classrooms, while testing activities and teacher…

The purpose of this study was to determine the reliability of the Tri-Cultural Attitude Scale (TAS). Based on the results of a sample of 336 Puerto Rican, Black-American and Anglo-American elementary school pupils in a large Connecticut city, the authors found generally significant relationships between the TAS and various criterion measures.…

This paper describes Project on Involvement, which was designed to investigate student involvement in a task by defining it in terms of nonverbal behaviors and by identifying its dimensions. To accomplish these objectives, eight trained graduate students made 15-minute observations of each of 44 preschool children. The children were observed in…

This study developed a semantic differential (SD) instrument to measure self-concept that was not influenced by social desirability. An alpha factor analysis of 53 SD scales produced five interpretable factors for the females and five interpretable factors for the males. A subsequent investigation of the convergent validity of each of the factors…

The purposes of this study were to investigate (1) the consistency among fifth-grade children in conceptual style across different conceptual style instruments and (2) the generalizability of conceptual style behavior to school related tasks when stability and instability of children's conceptual style were taken into consideration. Children…

A video performance monitoring system was developed by the URS/Matrix Company, under contract to the USAF Human Resources Laboratory and was evaluated experimentally in three technical training settings. Using input from 1 to 8 video cameras, the system provided a flexible combination of signal processing, direct monitor, recording and replay…

The purpose of this study was to collect data on behavior, including educational media usage, in a wide range of educational settings through use of participant observation. Eight special education teachers and their classrooms were used. An instrument adapted from the OSTRAQ system was used to measure 12 categories of pupil-teacher interaction…

Although the "Don't Know" (DK) option has received telling criticism in maximum performance summative tests, its potential use in formative evaluation was considered and judged to be more promising. The pretest of an instructional module was administered with DK options. Examinees were then required to answer each question to which they had…