The primary purpose of this study was to replicate and extend research in the area of teachers expectancies toward an adult education population in a remedial course, the General Technical Review Course at a military base in the Southeastern United States. The students, 68 blacks, 27 whites, and 12 Spanish speakers were initially administered an…

The impact of state-mandated testing on an urban school district in New Jersey is examined in this paper, which describes the evolution of the testing program and its shift in emphasis from individual student assessment to its use as the primary indicator of school success or failure. To meet state certification standards, 75 percent of the third,…

The implementation and evaluation of the effects of a seven-period day on students and teachers, especially on student achievement, is the purpose of this study. A three-part methodology includes two applications of the Concerns Based Adoption Model (CBAM) to teachers; administration of the School Attitude Survey (SAS) to students and teachers;…

To assist low achieving students in the mastery of instructional objectives in major subject areas, the Ministry of Education of Israel published definitions of Minimum Achievement Requirements (MAR) for specific subjects at all grade levels. To examine the feasibility of the MAR approach and to determine whether it contributed to the attainment…

The method presented is a means of determining the communality of the content of two or more texts in the same knowledge domain. The discipline studied was physics. Undergraduate curricula at 59 colleges were studied to determine consensus among the textbooks with respect to general program requirements and specific course offerings. Chapter…

The Administrative Grid and the Organizational Climate Survey (OCS) are evaluated in this report for their usefulness in assessing performance of practicing administrators. The Administrative Grid allows the plotting of scores measuring people and task orientation according to effectiveness (the accomplishment of recognized objectives of…

A reanalysis of norm- and criterion-referenced achievement test data from Tennessee's Student Teacher Achievement Ration Project builds on research utilizing class size and student achievement as an independent and a dependent variable, respectively. The study examined patterns of achievement among minority and white students in small, regular,…

The major task of life is to become masterful. As individuals grow the choice of which tasks to attempt and how best to achieve mastery at them becomes increasingly under their control by the situations they choose to engage in and by perceptions of their abilities. Mastery oriented people tend to attribute failure to unstable, external factors…

A survey of business and industrial training team supervisors and members was undertaken in order to identify the most important entry-level competencies required of instructional development specialists in a variety of business and industrial settings. The study sample of 300 was randomly selected from the approximately 2,850 members of the…

The methods used to assign grades to students have long been of concern to teachers. Traditional approaches to solving the difficulties have centered on norm-referenced and criterion-referenced evaluations. A promising alternative arises when criterion-referenced evaluation is linked with contract grading. A student may contract with a teacher to…

This paper starts from the assumption that the typical grading systems used by most American secondary schools need overhauling and discusses the implementation of an alternative student evaluation system that is individualized, noncompetitive, and nonpunitive. Most of the paper describes a performance-based, criterion-referenced student…

A research project is described which, using Gardner and Lambert's scales plus 10 other instruction-related items, sought: (1) to examine the stability of attitudes, as changes might occur from the beginning of a course to its end; (2) subsequently, to draw inferences as to the impact that a German language and/or culture course might have on…

Serious drawbacks can be cited for almost every form of student performance evaluation. The typical A-B-C-D report seldom tells anything really meaningful; the arguments against this system are many--unless you have straight A offspring. Written comments or reports are good if they tell, in a meaningful way, what the student is accomplishing in…

This report summarizes the school factors that affect the academic achievement of black urban high school students. An examination of changes in the academic achievement of the members of a class of 148 students between the sophomore and senior years found the following changes: (1) 4 percent of those who had been classified as "high achievers" as…

This paper describes a computerized system designed and developed for the purpose of simplifying and improving scoring and summarizing the achievement of students participating in Title I programs. The goal of the evaluation and reporting system is to provide meaningful and comparable information about Title I projects at the school building,…