An investigation was made of the extent to which mental operations involved in quantitative conservation and pretense play affect the development of gender constancy. The research design included three phases: a pretest establishing subjects' levels of conservation and gender understanding, a training phase, and conservation and gender constancy…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of two death education seminars to create in the participants a better capacity to prepare for their own death and to cope with the death of others. An affective death education seminar was presented to 28 health education students, and a cognitive death education seminar was presented…

This paper compares five growth measures using the High School and Beyond database. The measures are: (1) simple gain (posttest minus pretest); (2) difference between group means; (3) percentage of students who scored higher on the posttest than the pretest; (4) percentage of items missed on the pretest which are subsequently answered correctly on…

This paper focuses generally on student non-cognitive improvement before and after a Newark Chapter 1 program implementation; and specifically, on demonstrated growth in the non-cognitive areas over the year from pre-assessment to post-assessment as part of the Chapter 1 intervention. The evaluation was conducted, based on classification in terms…

A difficulty associated with the use of Golub and Frederick's syntactic density score was the time required in hand tabulation. This drawback was resolved with the development by Kidder of a computer program which calculates a syntactic density score for writing samples. The purpose of this study was to examine the sensitivity of the Syntactic…

This study examined three statistical methods for selecting items for mastery tests. One is the pretest-posttest method due to Cox and Vargas (1966); it is computationally simple, but has a number of serious limitations. The second is a latent trait method recommended by van der Linden (1981); it is computationally complex, but has a number of…

Concerned with a high failure rate in computer programming courses, two studies were undertaken to discover if two individual cognitive styles--"analytic" (formal thought) and "heuristic" (concrete or pre-operational thought)--were predictors of performance in a beginning computer programming course. To appropriately measure…

Using the generative model of learning, this study investigates the effects of reader constructed text headings on readers' text recall and comprehension. One hundred pupils, ages 12-14, from the Blythe Bridge Comprehensive School, Staffordshire, England, were assigned to one of two treatment groups using a 1000-word passage. The experimental…

Affective experiences have been shown to influence student self-concept and to influence and predict academic achievement. In the present research, two groups of seventh-grade boys and girls numbering 30 in all participated in either facilitated or directed affective experiences in which they explored personal feelings and attitudes toward school,…

Intended to assist media managers in making appropriate decisions and planning allocations of resources for an instructional program, this study was designed to determine if captions displayed on instructional video programs interfere with learning in hearing audiences. Subjects were 80 university students enrolled in five undergraduate general…

The effectiveness of a computer-assisted system to deliver an introductory course on educational computing to preservice elementary and early childhood teachers was investigated in this study. The 33 subjects enrolled in a one-hour Computer Literacy for Teachers course during the spring semester 1986 at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, worked…

This paper summarizes formative evaluation activities during the development of a pilot program by the Consortium for Mathematics and Its Applications for a telecourse on introductory data analysis. These activities included: (1) two major design activities--selection of a statistician host teacher and script development; (2) production phase…

The effect of maternal personality characteristics and interaction behavior on interventions with children was investigated among 210 Puerto Rican mother/child dyads of low socioeconomic status. Mothers' and children's personality characteristics were assessed according to numerous and varied paper-and-pencil tests. Measures of children's…

The objective of the present research was to investigate the effects of test-wiseness training on achievement. The study involved 208 Black, White and Hispanic students in grades three and five. An experimental training session was employed to test whether four aspects of test-wiseness (following directions, guessing, answer changing, and use of…

The study investigated retention of gains in reading/language skills after one year by 378 eighth-grade students in 18 health studies classrooms. Six classrooms were assigned to each of three groups, two experimental and one control, taught by health science teachers who were: (1) trained in reading/language techniques; (2) not trained in…