As a response to the artificiality of the traditional reading comprehension test, this booklet provides alternative means of testing that are within the guidelines of the British National Criteria. Ideas for testing informative, persuasive, autobiographical, and literary materials are presented in the booklet--carefully chosen to provide material…

This paper provides an understanding of the conceptual and operational relationships between evaluation, content analysis, and microcomputers so that evaluation practitioners can better address applied content analysis problems used in their work. The first section presents a general model for conducting an evaluation effort that focuses on…

A study investigated the effectiveness of the Rasch procedure in measuring response appropriateness, especially for the detection of cheating on multiple-choice language tests. The report gives background information on appropriateness measurement and its potential uses, reviews recent research on cheating and its detection, and describes three…

This document presents a review of recent research efforts on the congnitive domain as it relates to teaching and learning in the classroom, and provides a syntheses of research obtained over the past 25 years. Focus is given to correlational and experimental studies indicating a significant positive relationship between certain teacher behaviors…

Although research in nonverbal communication is in its seventh decade, the origins of individual differences in nonverbl sensitivity remain. To investigate the relationship between family norms of emotional expression and nonverbal communication, 64 college students completed the Family Expressiveness Questionnaire, were videotaped while…

In a recent controversial article, "Feeling and Thinking: Preferences Need No Inferences" (l980), R. B. Zajonc argues in support of the independence of affect and cognition. Examination of the structure and assumptions of Zajonc's arguments suggests that they do not support the view that affect is non-cognitive. Zajonc appears to leap…

Since bilingual education became an official government mandate, there has been much controversy regarding its philosophy, objectives, procedures, and effectiveness. Some educators choose to view bilingual education as transitory, and other educators believe minority students should be given bilingual instruction throughout their public school…

An index identifying factors leading to unusual response patterns by students, the modified caution index, was computed for the reading comprehension and study skills items of Booklet 5 from the 1979 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading achievement survey given to the 9-, 13- and 17-year-old samples. The analyses focused on…

A city planner's writing is usually not "technical" in the sense that the writing of engineers is technical. In each planning genre, extremely complex information, some of it "technical"--numbers, projections, and so forth--must be communicated clearly. For the professional planner, there are often severe time constraints and the need to proceed…

This paper describes the Self-Evaluation Maintenance Model (SEM), developed by psychologists to learn more about stability and change in self-definition. An initial section discusses the situational-motivational processes assumed necessary for individuals to maintain a positive self-evaluation, i.e., a reflection process and a comparison process.…

Techniques to identify the degree to which a response pattern is unusual and the pattern's relationship to examinee background are presented. Sato's caution index and modified caution index use clusters of items for comparisons of observed performance outcomes and do not require the use of item response theory. Correlation between the indices was…

The shift in paradigm from product to process should force a new look at the ways in which the teacher reads student writing. From the perspective of reader-response criticism, it should be no surprise that teachers would differ in their response to, and therefore assessment of, student writing. Examining two graded student essays, one from a…

Although termination of longterm therapy has been regarded as a loss experience, termination of counseling is viewed primarily in terms of goal attainment. Little is known about how counselors handle termination and how clients react to the experience. To explore clients' experiences of, and reactions to, termination of counseling, and to…

A 1978 study (Torgesen, Bowen and Ivey) of the structure and modality variables of the Visual-Aural Digit Span (VADS) test was replicated to determine: (1) if the effects generalized across age; (2) if differences between simultaneous and sequential visually presented items were due to mode of presentation or the amount of study time; (3) the…

The analysis of fit of data to a measurement model for graded responses is described. The model is an extension of Rasch's dichotomous model to formats which provide more than two levels of response to items. The model contains one parameter for each person and one parameter for each "step" in an item. A dichotomously-scored item…