This transcript of a National Public Radio Broadcast records the second of a two part program devoted to the presentation and discussion of various issues relating to minimum competence in schools. Recorded are the views of educators, school administrators, writers, critics and interested individuals on the following topics: competency tests as…

During its infancy period, humanistic education was strongly influenced and nurtured by T-Group and Human Relations Training, along with the personal growth and encounter activities of the human potential movement. As it moved into childhood, humanistic education recognized the need for more practical methods of implementing its new ideas and…

Because inexperienced or basic writers depend on the semantics of everyday spoken dialogue when writing, research on written composition and the developmental links between spoken and written language should be more accessible to the practitioners who teach writing to those students. A review of the literature supports the theory of a semantic…

In an era in which the credibility of public schools is falling with the general public, community forensics performances by students have the potential for cultivating public awareness of the effectiveness of the schools. Forensics is intrinsically related to basic speaking and listening skills, and since there is great potential for…

The music, art, and physical education areas can lay the groundwork for the basic skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic. For example, music instruction develops receptive, auditory, visual, emotional, and mathematical areas. Art instruction emphasizes eye-hand coordination, creativity, concentration, spatial relationships, planning, and…

The development and implementation of the Dallas Independent School District's Basic Objectives Assessment Test (BOAT) are described. Beginning in 1979, this minimum competency test was administered system-wide to all students in grades 8-12 (except for those enrolled as special education students), and beginning in 1983 it will be used in…

The relationship was investigated between test scores obtained from the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS) and the Iowa Tests of Educational Development (ITED), and the grade point average (GPA) at the high school and college level. The data used were unique in providing a longitudinal comparison of college students' performance with the results of…

An instructional program based on a learning hierarchy and involving the addition of fractions was presented to fourth grade students in a pretest - posttest design. The results of the tests were analyzed using both Walbesser's and White's techniques for validation. There was sufficient disagreement in the results to prevent a conclusion of…

Teachers in the content areas of the curriculum must expend effort and use ingenuity in motivating students to learn the literacy skills of listening, speaking, thinking, reading, writing, and computing. To foster this enthusiasm for learning, seven elements are essential in any teaching strategy: interests (knowing the students' interests and…

The Communication Experience Approach (CEA), a modification of the Language Experience Approach to teaching reading, involves the use of group activities designed to help functionally illiterate persons learn basic communication skills. This paper first discusses six distinct processes in the CEA: setting a specific purpose for communicating,…

The high school minimal competency examination described in this document is part one of a three-part program that requires that all students satisfactorily complete tests in reading, language arts, and mathematics prior to receiving a high school diploma. The document outlines the test development and assessment program and describes the plan for…

This paper advances the thesis that students should be trained to recognize acceptable and unacceptable performances in basic skill areas and should assume responsibility for attaining proficiency in these areas. Among the topics discussed are the value of having junior high school students check their own assignments, discover their errors, and…

This paper describes the methods used for revising the Cincinnati Mathematics Inventories, a battery of criterion-referenced tests of basic skills used in the Cincinnati Title III program and other city-wide special programs. Each of these tests is designed to cover a half-year of work; items are included to sample skills listed in the Catalog of…

"Newsweek's" article "Why Johnny Can't Write" (Dec. 8, 1975), adopts a "know it all posture" which defies the real evaluation of the statistical decline in language skills among high school graduates. "Newsweek's" attribution of this decline to the presence of television culture and its focusing of blame on…

Although English teachers have been blamed for the decreasing verbal ability of the nation's children, recent declines may be more accurately attributed to the general instructional climate of the day. The post-Sputnik era viewed education as a function of active intervention, where the teacher assumed a dominant role in shaping the students'…