The traditional theoretical rationale underlying audio-visual instruction has been that the more concrete a presentation is, the more effective it will be in the instructional situation. Some researchers have questioned the validity of the above rationale. The author presents evidence that it may be advantageous to compress and simplify…

A post-mortem on the Office of Economic Opportunity's version of performance contracting and its efficacy as a change agent in education. (Author/JN)

The need for analysis of covariance is discussed in the context of present day education. . .new approaches to instruction including new methods, curricula, devices and patterns of classroom organization. A problem is then used as an example of a typical experiment and the reader is led step by step through the application, analysis and…

The question to be answered in the study was: Are there significant differences in learning when students are presented organizers before the learning passages (pre-organizers), after the learning passages (post-organizers), or when they are presented only the learning passages (no-organizers)? (Author)

This paper provides a guide to the minimum size of treatment groups, inferred from the relationships between pupil norms and norms for class averages of standardized achievement tests. (Editor)

This paper presents the results of an experiment conducted to assess the affects of teaching recursion in two disjoint, non-consecutive units of instruction. One group of students was taught basic and advanced recursion topics in four consecutive class periods, while a second group was taught recursion in two two-period blocks that were separated…

THIS STUDY WAS DESIGNED TO DETERMINE WHETHER SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCES OCCUR IN MASTERY OF A COLLEGE COURSE LECTURE-DISCUSSION TYPE FOR FRESHMEN AND SOPHOMORES WHEN STUDENTS USE PROGRAMED MATERIALS OF INSTRUCTION RATHER THAN STANDARD TEXTBOOKS. FOUR STANDARD AND FOUR PROGRAMED SECTIONS WERE USED FOR COMPARATIVE PURPOSES. STUDENTS SELECTED THESE…

This paper presents a number of inferential statistical models that may aid the operant investigator in presenting his data. (Author/RK)

The criticism of the Westinghouse-Ohio National Evaluation of Head Start is answered. (CK)

This research investigates stochastic approximation procedures of the Robbins-Monro type. Following a brief introduction to sequential experimentation, attention is focused on formal methods for selecting successive values of a single independent variable. Empirical results obtained through computer simulation are used to compare several formal…

Advocates that information on student aptitude for foreign language learning be used not, as in the past, for determining the best general method for language teaching but rather for determining the best teaching method for particular kinds of students. (FB)

The problem of spurious significance in multivariate exploratory research is discussed. When a very large number of statistical tests are performed, many tests will be significant on the basis of chance alone. To counter this problem, the use of two sign tests to analyze sets of results has been suggested; the chance expectation [CE test] assesses…

Exploratory research with large numbers of variables and even larger numbers of relationships is likely to result in frequent Type II errors; that is falsely accepting an incorrect null hypotheses. There are three ways of reducing Type II errors: (1) choosing a lower significance level, which then increases the probability of Type I error; (2)…