The first and last essays of 209 randomly selected students who had received a passing grade in English Composition I at Bucks County Community College during Fall, 1976, were evaluated at the end of the semester by a committee of English teachers from other institutions. The committee assessed improvement in relation to several instructional…

"The Now and the Future," a unit that integrates career development into existing eighth and ninth grade language arts programs, was revised to reduce sex-role stereotyping in career exploration experiences and was implemented in 24 schools. This project performance report describes the major activities involved in revising the…

Results of the first year of the ongoing Confidential, Measurement-Based, Self-Evaluation Project that examines variables related to A-level English and Mathematics achievement in 10 comprehensive schools in the United Kingdom are presented. A-level results were found to be strongly predicted by teacher assessments and by prior O-level achievement…

Senior Project is a culminating assessment for high school seniors, involving planning, research, writing, and presentations. Characteristics and outcomes of the program were studied via surveys of 436 teachers, 422 students, and 163 graduates at 4 Senior Project schools and 4 control schools in rural and small-town North Carolina. Findings…

Field notes and interview data were triangulated with secondary data in this ethnographic study to generate a description of social organization. A partial theory of the teacher's actions in working with a predominantly Black group of 17 low-income rural high school students was devised. Teacher effectiveness in this situation is described. (SLD)

Subtle forms of resistance found during ethnographic observation of 2 suburban high school English classes with 65 students are not found in a third class of 31 suburban high school students. The dialectical attitude of resistance and compliance is influenced by teaching approach and style of classroom interaction. (SLD)

Three college instructors, teaching very different content (management, political science, and literature) and using classroom assessment techniques (CATs), compared the results. All found that CATs contributed to self-reflection, that designing CATs helps faculty focus on course and class goals, and that responding to CATs requires students to…

This study examined the structure of adolescent self-concept (SC) structure for males and females by using three different measures of each SC facet in a covariance structure analysis of the data. Specifically, the purposes of the study were to: (1) test the hypothesis of the invariance of a multidimensional, hierarchical SC structure for males…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 16 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) teacher behavior patterns during episodes of reading instruction in grades 4, 5, and 6; (2) the influence of teachers' conceptual frameworks of reading on…

A study was undertaken to determine if there was a difference in verbal responses in classrooms of teachers who scored high and who scored low on the complexity scale of the Omnibus Personality Inventory (OPI), which measures teacher tolerance of ambiguity and preference for complexity. Forty college English teachers were tested and ranked…

This report presents the process-outcome relationships discovered in the Texas Junior High School Study of correlates of effective teaching. Classroom processes and cognitive and affective indices of outcome are discussed for two subject areas (English and math) and for classrooms with varying levels of entering ability. The four separate papers…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 29 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: alternative views of the English curriculum; development of curriculum theory and language arts; sentence combining; vocabulary development; the effect of music…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral disserations. The 19 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) an instructional program for enhancing teachers' knowledge of resources in children's literature; (2) behaviors indicating teacher enthusiasm; (3) the "relate"…

The eight studies on reading reported in this publication focus on research in the areas of greatest concern to the general English teacher. The findings and conclusions of systematic empirical investigations as well as descriptive analyses, status studies, and surveys are presented on (1) preparation for teaching reading; (2) variations in…

Compares inferences about story characters' behavior, perceptions, and goals made by eighth graders, eleventh graders, college freshmen, and college seniors. Concludes that from early adolescence to young adulthood, readers shift from conceptions of characters in terms of immediate surface feelings and behaviors to conceptions in terms of…