In an ongoing experiment in the basic public speaking course at Miami University (Ohio), an attempt has been made to devise a testing approach that preserves the viability of the evaluation process and, at the same time, is efficient to administer and acceptable to students as a measure of what they have learned while performing. The alteration of…

This working paper, which reviews the experimental literature on learning skills to provide background information to the staff of the Skills Essential to Learning Television Project (a multi-level series of video and print resources for classroom use), covers four areas: study skills, instructional development and design, cognitive psychology,…

Authors who write introductory business statistics texts do not agree on when to use a t distribution and when to use a Z distribution in both the construction of confidence intervals and the use of hypothesis testing. In a survey of textbooks written in the last 15 years, we found the decision rules to be contradictory and, at times, the…

Recent research by Valette, Oller, and others has shown the utility of dictation as a measure of general language competence when correlated with achievement and proficiency batteries for French and English as a second language. No such studies have been conducted with Spanish. The investigator hypothesized that since Spanish is a phonetic…

Outlines a methods for applying the findings of contrastive analysis to the development of pedagogical materials. (AM)

The articles and presentations in this publication relate to the general theme of the 1982 Northeast Conference, the foreign language teacher as a lifelong learner. The concept that in the best teachers learning and teaching form a progressive continuum, and that learning and teaching occur simultaneously is the basic assumption underlying all the…

In research to test the link between children's failure to engage in comparison activity and their poor communication performance, elementary school students were trained to engage in comparison activity to learn whether such training would improve their referential communication accuracy. Two training experiments with third and fourth grade…

The purpose of this study was to explore the effects of intensive instruction (II) in either the observation of details (cue attendance - CA) or the production of tenable hypotheses (hypothesis generation - HG) about a science problem. Two questions were investigated: (1) Were there significant differences between students intensively instructed…

This paper forucses on the problems and challenges facing the American teacher working in Europe. The discussion is divided into 16 main topics: (1) the limited teaching opportunities in Europe, (2) standardized procedures for employment, (3) the teaching contract, (4) assignment at different levels, (5) teaching benefits, (6) daily changes in the…

Reported is a project designed to develop and implement a secondary school physics program that allowed for student variation in individual learning style, mathematical aptitude and topical interests. Initiated in 1967, this four-year individualized, modular program is divided into four major phases: (1) introductory and instruments, (2)…

Conclusions reached after three years of performance contracting experience and materials with which to judge the validity of the conclusions are presented in this overview of performance contracting. The conclusions are: (1) commercial firms are no better at teaching children than are public schools; (2) commercial firms expend as much or more…

At the 1970 meeting of the American Educational Research Association a symposium, jointly sponsored by the National Council on Measurement in Education, was presented on the topic "Criterion-Referenced Measurement: Emerging Issues." The following papers were presented: "Instructional Technology and the Measurement of Learning Outcomes: Some…

Seventy-two university students were exposed to one of four repetition treatments for one of three different amounts of information presented in a chunked format. Implicit chunk repetition, i.e., the presentation of words not present in the original word list but logically belonging to a previously seen chunk, facilitated acquisition and retention…

This document is an English-language abstract (approximately 1,500 words) of a study of the stimulus variable of "frame size" and a group of variables reflecting student ability and sex. Individual differences were studied by varying ability, as measured by school grades and a battery of seven "factor tests" of intelligence and…