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…

Preschoolers were assigned to experimental and control groups to investigate whether they could learn novel words when viewing television and whether the learning was influenced by age or type of word. (PCB)

Addresses the four questions raised by Yelon about use of pretests with instruction--should I pretest; on what should I pretest; how should I pretest; how should I adjust to results--and answers them from the perspective of instructional designers conducting formative evaluations to improve quality of instruction under development. (MBR)

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…

Analysis of naturalistic data identified features of adult-child talk which occurred frequently at school but rarely at home. One of these features--question sequences intended to elicit an answer--was used in an intervention study and was found to promote young children's understanding of ambiguity in verbal messages. (PCB)

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…

In recent years, assessment of what is actually learned or accomplished in a college career has gained increasing attention. An instructor of a weather and climate geography course at Illinois State University constructed a 25-question multiple choice test in order to develop a method of assessing what his students learned during the course. The…

A Study of the effects of a one-hour credit course in bibliographic instruction on students' attitudes and library skills compared their scores on an attitudinal survey and objective skills test administered at the first and last classes. Improvement was found in both areas. A copy of the skills test is appended. (2 references) (MES)

The explicit, experimental introduction of a series of logical inconsistencies is described and recommended as a means of disrupting the faulty logic and, thereby, enhancing the use of more appropriate probabilistic reasoning by graduate students enrolled in an introductory inferential statistics course. (14 references) (JJK)

A research project was designed to test two hypotheses concerning the teaching of music notation: (1) the overhead projector would prove superior to the chalkboard as a teaching aid; and (2) the use of the overhead projector would cause students to retain knowledge better and score higher on standardized music tests. The study involved 93 students…

The effectiveness of two workshops provided for teachers and aides in a day care center was studied. Training was effective in increasing caregiver verbal involvement with children during play, but was less effective in reducing the number of verbal directives delivered by caregivers to children. (PCB)

Develops generalizations for empirical evaluation of software based upon suitability of several research designs--pretest posttest control group, single-group pretest posttest, nonequivalent control group, time series, and regression discontinuity--to type of software being evaluated, and on circumstances under which evaluation is conducted. (MBR)

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…