The purpose and direction of the Office of Student Financial Aid (OSFA) quality improvement program are described. The background and context for the Pell Grant quality control (QC) design study and the meaning of QC are reviewed. The general approach to quality improvement consists of the following elements: a strategic approach that enables OSFA…

A study was conducted in 1976 of applicants who submitted corrections or amendments to their Student Eligibility Reports (SERs) for the Basic Educational Opportunity Grant (BEOG) Program. The objective was to review the applications corrections process and to determine factors linked to applicants' use of correction procedures. Attention was…

The validity of information provided in applications to the Basic Educational Opportunity Grant (BEOG) program was studied, along with procedures used in recovering overpayments. The objective was to investigate misreporting and misuse of the BEOG program. A 1977-1978 study reviewed cases referred to the U.S. Office of Education by educational…

The use of estimated income to analyze financial need of applicants to the Basic Educational Opportunity Grant (BEOG) program was investigated. Attention was focused on: how well applicants estimate their income; reasons for errors in estimation, and whether applicants supplying income tax returns supply true versions. For 1,547 eligible BEOG…

This study explores how children indicate that a new character or object is being introduced into a written text and how they tell their readers that a particular word refers to something which has appeared in the text before. In particular, the study focuses on information represented by noun phrases in written narrative texts. To investigate how…

Accountability has become a concern for public mental health programs, including the Hawaii State Mental Health Division which relies on the Multi-State Information System (MSIS) for program planning and evaluation. Accuracy in reporting and agreement in clinical judgment on the MSIS has been assumed but never tested until an analogue study was…

Generalizability theory is described and applied to data collection methods for student ratings of instruction. Three generalizability coefficients (generalizing over both students and items, generalizing over students only, and generalizing over items only) are defined, and the appropriateness of each for various purposes is discussed.…

This selective bibliography lists 2 books, or sections in books, and 6 journal articles dealing with Hebrew-English contrastive studies. The entries range in date from 1965 to 1974. The books cited are Israeli or European publications, and the articles appeared in well-known European or American pedagogical language journals. (TL)

Speech errors have been used in the construction of production models of the phonological and semantic components of language, and for a model of interactional processes. Errors also provide insight into how speakers plan discourse and syntactic structure,. Different types of discourse exhibit different types of error. The present data are taken…

Articles in this volume relate to the Yugoslav Serbo-Croatian-English Contrastive Project: (1) "The Yugoslav Serbo-Croatian-English Contrastive Project at the End of its Second Phase (1971-1975)," Rudolf Filipovic: Pedagogical goals and application of contrastive analysis are best achieved when accompanied by error analysis. Reports,…

The "state of the art" in the three fields of contrastive analysis, error analysis and interlanguage is critically examined from the point of view of evolving an explanatory theory of a second language learner's performance. Each field is discussed with respect to its outreach, theoretical assumptions, methodology, claims and empirical…

This paper evaluates the pedagogic aspects of the Yugoslavian Serbocroatian-English Contrastive Project. The project carried out a contrastive analysis of the phonological, morphological, syntactic and lexical structures of English and Serbocroatian, and an error analysis in the use of English parts of speech and sentence parts. The investigation…

Before any conclusions can be drawn about the relative complexity of grammatical items, the items should be thoroughly analyzed. For example, learning to use French gender involves much more than learning to recognize formal characteristics which account for gender in nouns; it also requires that semantic gender features be mastered, so that…

This paper examines the validity of the concept of linguistic units in a theory of speech production. Substantiating data are drawn from the study of the speech production process itself. Secondarily, an attempt is made to reconcile the postulation of linguistic units in speech production theory with their apparent absence in the speech signal.…

The purpose of this research was to determine if training in analytic processing would increase the probability that subjects behaving impulsively prior to training would behave more reflectively following training. The study attempted to alter impulsive behavior in terms of number of errors by training identified impulsive boys to use component…