Traditionally, tests in the language arts have focused on the mechanical skills of reading, writing, and spelling. The problems which have arisen because of tests which measure reading and composing ability without ever requiring the child to actually read or compose have been compounded by teachers' tendencies to turn children away from books by…

The relative contributions of test anxiety and exam-taking skills to information-processing deficits were investigated in a dual-task paradigm comparing high and low test-anxious students with either good or poor exam-taking skills. Sixty-four undergraduate students (21 males, 43 females) were selected based upon pre-test scores on the Test…

Undergraduates responded to an objective test in electronics and classified each item by domain (one of 14 topics covered in their text), and by type of knowledge (definition, fact, principle, or interpretation). These judgments were compared to their instructor's "standard" judgments. From these data, an index of item-domain divergence…

The instructional components of mediation, a teaching technique used in dynamic assessment, were evaluated with 100 four-year-old children attending daycare or preschools in London, Ontario. The effects of familiarization with task materials, task-specific rule teaching, and elaborated feedback were assessed using a pretest-posttest design.…

The effect of anxiety on learning in a variety of educational contexts is reviewed in general, and two areas of anxiety research especially relevant to educational psychology are reviewed in detail. The first is test anxiety reduction programs, and the second is the outcomes of these programs and the interaction between anxiety and instructional…

In order to accurately assess the learning of vocabulary words, a criterion of learning achievement must be set for each word or group of words. This criterion would reflect: (1) the amount of semantic, grammatical, and phonological information the learner had to possess in order to have learned the word; (2) the receptive and productive processes…

The question examined in this paper is: what is known exactly about variables that affect long-term retention of knowledge learned in school? U. Neisser (1982) asserts that "it is difficult to find even a single study, ancient or modern, of what is retained from academic instruction." Further, popular belief holds that much of the knowledge…