"Newsweek's" article "Why Johnny Can't Write" (Dec. 8, 1975), adopts a "know it all posture" which defies the real evaluation of the statistical decline in language skills among high school graduates. "Newsweek's" attribution of this decline to the presence of television culture and its focusing of blame on…

This social studies unit uses conflicting eyewitness and secondary accounts of what happened in Lexington, Massachusetts, on April 19, 1775, to illustrate the nature and methods of history and to encourage the student to function as an historian. Sections of the unit (1) introduce problems faced by historians by focusing on documentary materials…

Better equipped than most teachers in a humanistic background and in a knowledge of advances in interdisciplinary study, the English teacher is well-qualified to achieve a major educational goal--to help a student acquire a disciplined attitude toward knowledge through the analysis of ideas. One method of reaching this goal is through the…

This analysis of argumentation considers three separate, yet interrelated, aspects of the persuasive argument: evidence, warrant, and claim. A study of each of these components is presented in separate chapters with an examination of the role and standards each must carry out in formulating sound, logical proof. A classification of types of…

With television operating as an important socializing influence, children need to become critical consumers and they can be taught the necessary evaluative skills. Explicit discussion is seen as a means of developing awareness of various facets of TV programming, e.g., the relationship of reality to content, stereotyped images presented, any bias…

Five different metaphors of evaluation are discussed: judging, criticizing, assessing, appraising, rating; the faculty can be evaluated for appointment, tenure, promotion, salary, termination, improvement. Faculty can be evaluated for research, teaching, and service, and they can be evaluated by other faculty, administrators, students, and outside…

Examines the effect of the severity and causal nature of initial provocation on seventy-two five- to ten-year-old children's retaliation judgments. Children's perceptions of the provocation were more differentiated than those that had previously been reported. Evaluation of the retaliator varied systematically according to perceptions of the…

Offers two lessons for instructors of business writing courses, the first of which asks students to analyze actual samples of business documents and correspondence, and the second of which asks students to interview eight business people about the type and amount of writing they do in the course of their work. (JC)

Describes three studies that examined how young children distinguish between the real, physical world and the mental world; between objects and thoughts; and between doing something and imagining it. (HOD)

Focuses on the development of materials to help textbook adoption committees evaluate the instructional quality of commercially developed basal reading programs. Describes the development of the Adoption Guidelines Booklets. (Author/NH)

Varied conditions under which children aged four to five years matched the area of a rectangle with a given width or height to that of a square. Subjects matched one dimension of the rectangle to one side of the square suggesting that area matches seemed to be based on a side-matching strategy. (Author/AS)

Examines kindergarten, second-, and fourth-grade children's use of the presence or absence of extrinsic rewards to make inferences about the intrinsic motivation of another person. Results are discussed in terms of parameters of the attributional effects, the possible mechanism responsible for the phenomena, and significance for other…

Discusses the characteristics of the American educational system, outlines the various and developing world crisis, and suggests that teachers need to prepare creative, innovative, independent thinkers who can embrace the problems of the world and survive. (Author/RK)

This author argues that teachers of the humanities have the potential to enjoy, at the community college level, specific teaching opportunities that their university counterparts are less likely to exercise. University professors of upper-division and graduate students are more likely to find themselves teaching students about the particulars of…

The 1970s has become the time for reevaluating the intended purposes of tests, and for considering meaningful alternatives to the test score. Author considers the criterion-referenced versus the norm-referenced test. (Author/RK)