Designed to assess readers' evaluations of poems or other works of fiction, the Poetic Evaluation Rating Scale (PERS) is a set of 15 semantic differential scales. After each set of 11 poems, the reader checks a point along a line between two adjectives with opposite meanings (bi-polar adjectives). Each pair of adjectives is 1 of the 15 scales, all…

Designed to determine the professional reading backgrounds, habits, and interests of secondary English teachers, this study surveyed the amount of reading done in three areas: professional journals, books about the teaching of English, and books on general education. Titles of selected books (with authors) and journals are presented, along with…

Designed to measure the level of understanding of literal meaning attained by students in grades 5-8 through the use of syntactic clues within written standard English sentences, this silent reading test reveals a student's strengths and weaknesses in syntactic knowledge and thus helps the teacher plan a program of instruction. Reliability…

Designed to determine to what degree the reader's awareness of recognition of certain structural aspects of written English is a factor in reading comprehension, this measure defines four word classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) in syntactical or formal terms rather than in semantic terms. Each item in the test consists of two sentences:…

Designed to provide a scale for assessing the quality of personal or imaginative writing, the Evaluation Scale for Personal Writing (ESPW) consists of a group of twenty-eight imaginative essays written by British fifteen year olds. These essays have been arranged in order of quality by an eight member sub-committee of the London Association for…

Designed to assess the maturity level of the novels which students read, the Novel Reading Maturity Scale (NRMS) is based on the notion that fiction of high quality is characterized by a number of themes or topics. The list of 22 topics in NRMS came from a survey of several guides on books for teenagers. To explore the reliability of the scale,…

This digest outlines salient characteristics of teacher-led research and its benefits to teachers and students. A discussion of selected resources for teacher researchers, which are available through various components of the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC), follows the overview. Effective teacher research is an empowering…

This textbook in educational research is intended to guide students as they plan and carry out a research project. The book has three goals: to provide basic information needed to understand the research process; to enable students to use this knowledge to design their own research project; and to permit students to read and understand the…

This paper reports on a study developed to determine what experts in the area of educational research perceive as the basic skills and knowledge areas that one who has successfully completed a one-semester graduate course in educational research should possess. A decision was made to conduct a Delphi study to identify these skills and knowledge…

On the premise that the variety of problems plaguing education can be clustered around central themes conducive to attack in a systematic way by educational research and development (R & D) personnel, this paper deals with the scope of management problems, requirements of an R & D management model, and a proposed R & D management system, which…

Provided is an examination of the methodology used to study the problems of learning addition and subtraction skills used by developmental researchers. The report has sections on categories of theory and their methodologies, which review: (1) Behaviorist, Neo-Behaviorist and Piagetian Theories; (2) the Behaviorist and Piagetian Paradigms; (3)…

These proceedings contain forty three- to seven-page papers presented at an adult education research conference as well as two alternate papers, a background paper for a poster session, and abstracts and background papers of six symposia. Focus of the reports is on research needs, tools, and methods as they pertain to adult education. Issues…

Combining community participation in decision making with methods of social investigation, participatory research focuses on involvement of the subjects of the research in the research process. Adult educators are exploring this research method which, unlike quantitative research, serves the needs of individuals and not those of policy makers who…

The problems and rewards of conducting contemporary historical research are related in the light of the author's experiences in preparing an Ed.D. dissertation analyzing Malcolm S. Knowles' contributions to and influence on the field of adult education. Given its contemporaneous nature, the author terms the study accurate but inconclusive. The…

Designed to investigate verbal aggression in State of the Union messages during times of war and peace, this study attempted to devise a method for quantitatively analyzing verbal aggression in public, political communication and to describe and explain the relationship of verbal aggression in State of the Union messages to the existence of war…