This curriculum guide aims to facilitate teaching and learning in the area of personal/social behavior for exceptional children in grades K-12. The scope and sequence of the guide are intended to reflect the course of normal social development beginning with a focus upon the self, through the metamorphosis of the self into a social being. A major…

Evidence suggests that instruction in thinking skills is neither widespread nor successful. Most students do not score well on tests that measure their ability to recognize assumptions, evaluate arguments, or appraise inferences. However, a number of educators believe that it is possible to teach thinking skills, and have suggested that the…

The role of the academic community in providing introspection and thoughtful analysis at times of national chaos is addressed. While during the 1960s many campuses debated issues and examined national priorities, little credit has been given to academic leadership for fostering a thoughtful approach to difficult questions relating to national…

The Professional and Administrative Career Examination measures judgment ability using comprehension and logical order of events item types. Since the verbal component of comprehension items is high, and since these items are extremely difficult to write and document, a search was conducted for a simpler item type for assessing judgment. Three…

This instructional unit for the eighth grade is designed to help students identify and use a minimum of three important sources of vocational and educational material and to evaluate the information given in the sources used according to reliability, relevance, and bias. The sources of information investigated include high school, community…

Evaluation is an act of persuasion directed to a specific audience concerning the solution of a problem. The process of evaluation is prescribed by the nature of knowledge--which is generally complex, always uncertain (in varying degrees), and not always propositional--and by the nature of logic, which is always selective. In the process of…

Numerous problems face the nation's schools. These problems differ widely in their content, in their scope, in the types of people to whom they are important, and in the intensity with which people complain about them. Many schools try to pinpoint the causes of these problems and to look for solutions before the problems themselves are well…

An experiement was conducted to test the hypothesis that interest inventory items would function as reinforcing stimuli in a visual discrimination task. When previously rated liked and disliked items from the Strong Vocational Interest Blank were differentially presented following one of two responses, subjects learned to respond to the stimulus…

Grade four (20) and grade eight (20) Ontario parochial school children were interviewed to assess retrieval skills for school research projects, particularly selecting search areas/specific book sections for particular retrieval questions and evaluating gathered information. Older children were more skillful at generating/defining search areas and…

Describes the Chata Project, a British research project that challenged the prevalent assumption that children will construct sound causal explanations from factual information imparted during history instruction. Their research suggests that explicit instruction is required for children to understand the causal relationships among events,…

Presents the IRAC (Issue, Rule, Analysis, and Conclusion) method used to analyze and judge legal cases. Stresses this method's applicability for social studies instruction, stating it helps students assess facts and apply rules to reach and defend conclusions. Provides examples for using the IRAC method in U.S. government and U.S. history units.…

Focuses on encouraging teachers to become critical and reflective practitioners, researchers of their own professional life and agents of change. Four characteristics defining theory, research, and practice in the context of situated research are listed. Teacher research cannot be limited to quantitative research nor to the classroom. (24…

How people evaluate primary and secondary sources when considering historical questions was studied by asking eight historians and eight high school seniors to think aloud while reviewing written and pictorial documents about the Battle of Lexington. Differences between the groups are discussed concerning cognitive processes and beliefs about…

Provides an evaluator's view of the quantitative effects of the Core Knowledge Sequence, a content-based K-6 curriculum model, and other reforms at Hawthorne Elementary School (Houston, Texas). Pretest and posttest results show increased academic performance in reading, writing, and mathematics, based on Texas Assessment of Academic Skills…

In the face of social changes that are increasing the demand for available, affordable, quality child care, it is difficult to continue to think of child care as a purely private issue. This book presents an analysis of the state of American child care. It evaluates child care policies and the national attention given to young children and their…