In 1996, Florida's Miami-Dade Community College conducted a study to examine the college preparatory completion rates of first-time degree-seeking students based on their verbal and mathematics entry-level placement scores. Results include the following: (1) fewer than 30% of students scoring at the lowest level on the mathematics placement test…

An overview and analysis is presented of the Vance and Schlechty Study (1982) of education majors which indicated that there is a negative selection process which systematically attracts and holds in the teaching profession young people with modest verbal and mathematical abilities. Three factors, operating singly or in combination, were…

THIS STUDY OF THE ARTICULATORY AND INTELLIGIBILITY LEVEL OF A SOCIALLY DISADVANTAGED GROUP OF CHILDREN IN THE HEAD START PROGRAM INVOLVED 150 CHILDREN, 4 1/2 - 6 YEARS OF AGE, WITH EQUAL NUMBERS OF BOYS AND GIRLS. THIS GROUP WAS COMPOSED OF CHILDREN OF FAMILIES WITH SPANISH LANGUAGE BACKGROUND, OF CHILDREN OF NATIVE NEGRO FAMILIES, AND OF CHILDREN…

Fifty poverty-level Mexican American bilingual children in first and fourth grade were tested for verbal facility in both English and Spanish to determine which language was dominant at the initial grade level and an advanced grade level. An East Los Angeles almost all of its students lived in the same Federal Housing project, thus ensuring low…

Parents engaged in a book reading task with their preschool child. The extent to which parents' teaching of children becomes less directive as a function of children's age and communicative status and the relationship between parents' interaction styles and children's verbal intelligence quotient was studied. (DWH)

The internal/external (I/E) frames of reference model proposed by H. Marsh (1986, 1990) points to the relativistic nature of academic self-concept formation. It argues that students compare their own academic ability to that of their peers in an external comparison, and they compare their own verbal skills to their mathematics skills in an…

Tested whether the aged status in America results in distrust and despair with the social order (anomia). A multivariate regression analysis utilizing data on 354 men aged 40 and older showed no relationship between age or other indicators of life chances or anomia, net of education and/or verbal intelligence. (Author/RC)

Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (Revised) (WISC-R) factor structures were compared for learning disabled Navajo and Papago children. Results support the validity of the WISC-R as a measure of general intellectual functioning, and verbal and performance aspects for both groups, indicating its appropriateness for diverse groups of children.…

The old Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) and the New MCAT were compared by factor-analyzing the scores of a sample of 1,484 examinees who took both tests during 1976-77. Three common factors are interpreted: a general science quantitative factor, verbal ability, and interpretation skills. Variances are noted and implications of the data for…

Examines developmental patterns in the solution of verbal analogies. Twenty subjects in each of grades 3, 6, 9, and in college were tested on their relative abilities to solve 180 verbal analogies based on five different verbal relations. (CM)

Compares the past and projected use of media of beginning education majors as a function of their "communication apprehension," indicating high or moderate fear in professional discourse resulted in less past and projected future use. Decreasing the communication apprehension may increase the possibility that such teachers will use instructional…

The present study investigated the working memory abilities of children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) as measured by the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales, Fifth Edition (SBV). In a retrospective causal-comparative design, the archival data of 46 ADHD children were compared to 59 nondiagnosed children. The ADHD children…

Group differences based on giftedness and achievement were examined in acquisition and generalization of a strategy for solving verbal and figural analogies. The strategy involved making a sentence that captured the relationship between a pair of words and then applying that sentence to a third item. A total of 162 high-achieving gifted,…

This research is part of a longitudinal study designed to compare measures of first-grade oral language with reading achievement at various grade levels. The original study constructed ten measures for oral language from interviews with 100 first graders and compared those measures to the reading achievement of the subjects at the end of first…

Two levels of stimulus condition were used to determine whether or not the amount of salient information contained in the perceptual stimuli accompanying orally presented "wh-questions" (those including the concepts who, what, where, when, how and why) facilitates children's comprehension. Conditions varied in terms of the number of…