The possibility of approximating a function with a linear combination of exponential functions of the form e[superscript x], e[superscript 2x], ... is considered as a parallel development to the notion of Taylor polynomials which approximate a function with a linear combination of power function terms. The sinusoidal functions sin "x" and cos "x"…

A multi-faceted Rasch measurement (MFRM) model was used to analyze a clinical skills assessment of 173 fourth-year medical students in a Midwestern medical school to investigate four types of rater errors: leniency, inconsistency, halo, and restriction of range. Each student performed six clinical tasks with six standardized patients (SPs), who…

This guide to ERRATA, a set of HyperCard-based tools for response analysis and error diagnosis in language testing, is intended as a user manual and general reference and designed to be used with the software (not included here). It has three parts. The first is a brief survey of computational techniques available for dealing with student test…

ln this paper, the bibliographical references in five core entomology journals are examined for citation accuracy in order to determine if the error rates are similar. Every reference printed in each journal's first issue of 1992 was examined, and these were compared to the original (cited) publications, if possible, in order to determine the…

The relationship between the notion of "error" in linguistics and language teaching theory and its potential application to error correction in the second language classroom is examined. Definitions of "error" in psycholinguistics, native speech, and English second language instruction are discussed, and the relationship of interlanguage…

By looking for patterns of errors in the research papers of Asian students, educators can uncover pedagogical strategies to help students avoid repeating such errors. While a good deal of research has identified a number of sentence-level problems which are typical of Asian students writing in English, little attempt has been made to consider the…

In interlanguage, the transitional state reaching from one's native language to a given target language, phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical, sociocultural, or psycholinguistic errors may be generated and systematized by the process of fossilization. Depending on the amount of time needed for remediation, fossilized features may be…

A study of the linguistic interference of nine multilingual immigrants to the Saguenay Peninsula of Quebec province examined three types of interference in their spoken English. They included: (1) interlingual interference from the mother tongue; (2) intralingual intrusion from structures and lexical items from within English in situations and…

This article deals mainly with the pedagogical application of error analysis and error correction, and directs itself to foreign language and second language teachers and to teachers of speakers of nonstandard dialects. (CLK)

Results of a diagnostic test revealed that Thai students have no more trouble in learning English prepositions than others learning English as a second language; all the groups had difficulty. Error analysis was found to be just as effective in explaining mistakes as contrastive analysis. (AG)

It is argued here that childhood phonological errors systematically simplify the child's inventory of phonetic elements and strings. (Author/KM)

Error analysis has been presented as a means of "finding a shorter way" in the analysis of learners' difficulties in foreign languages. The alternative starts with a comparison of the native and foreign languages in order to predict such difficulties. The two types are complementary rather than mutually exclusive. (Author/MSE)

Students come to the classroom with theories that they have actively constructed from their everyday experiences. However, some of these theories are incomplete half-truths. Although such misconceptions interfere with new learning, students are often emotionally and intellectually attached to them. Some common mathematical misconceptions involve:…

Considered is a conceptual analog of buggy algorithms and rule-based mathematical development. The investigations consider whether children's efforts to make conceptual sense of new mathematics instruction in terms of their available knowledge may sometimes lead them to make systematic errors. In particular, the possibility is explored that…

Some results of seven studies of children's native Finnish language acquisition from 1971-1980 are summarized, focusing on two aspects: the main features in the development of Finnish inflection forms in 2-7-year-old children, and selected information derived from children's errors at the various age levels. Subjects were 260 children attending…