Mental health center administrators are concerned about persons who contact centers but fail to keep initial appointments. Factors within centers that discourage client follow-through must be identified and changed. Telephone surveys were attempted for 50 such individuals from the youth (N=23) and adult (N=27) team logs of the Weber Mental Health…

A three-phase study was conducted in Alberta, Canada, to determine factors influencing reading achievement and specifically to assess the effects of television viewing on reading achievement. In the first phase, 453 people responded to a survey regarding which factors they felt were important in influencing reading achievement. It was concluded…

This study reports evidence that early childhood programs can have an impact on the academic careers of children from low-income homes. A wide variety of status and process variables were collected by several individual investigators over four waves, or time periods, of data collection. Before pooling data from 14 longitudinal research and…

Under a mastery learning system students can take successive parallel tests with study interspersed between tests until they demonstrate a minimal level of competency. For most students, such procedures increase final performance, yet some may experience repeated subjective failure. Self-worth theory predicts that repeated failure in the face of…

Two lines of argument have been advanced to support the assertion that schooling makes little difference in the efforts of low status people to achieve equality or a fair chance at survival. One says that the genetic inferiority of certain races makes them incapable of benefitting from schooling. Although there is no hard biological evidence to…

Some individuals more readily develop learned helplessness in the classroom, so it is necessary for the educational system to acknowledge it and develop teaching methods to prevent it. Creating awareness among educators of this condition could greatly decrease its occurrence. Children who have a high risk of developing learned helplessness,…

A remedial-English pilot program for college freshmen yielded four major observations about basic writers: they are poor readers, their level of syntactic maturity is low, their writing is riddled with errors, and the strategies they use in their writing often work against them to compound their difficulties. Among the conclusions drawn from these…

At the completion of the fall semester, 1979, a study was conducted at Essex County College to determine the status of the 182 students who had received an "R" grade in a basic communications skills course (COM-080) in fall, 1978. The "R" grade is given to students who have made progress in a developmental course, but who have not attained "C"…

One of a series of sixteen knowledge transformation papers, this paper represents a comprehensive study of the nature and types of impact evaluation available to vocational administrators, researchers, and evaluation experts. After explaining the concepts of the CIPP (context, input, process, product) model, of summative evaluation and the value…

Several characteristics have been identified as permeating the lives of a great many dropouts. The potential dropout may be several years retarded in reading and mathematics, and is usually plagued by personal, social, and familial problems. Suggestions for stemming the alarming rate of school dropouts include community provision for treatment and…

The effects of actor identity on achievement attributions for success and failure were investigated. Subjects filled out a locus of control scale either for themselves, a neutral other, a liked other, or a disliked other. Within each actor identity variation, the scale items were either (1) unchanged from the original version or specified as (2)…

The purpose of this study was to compare the characteristics of kindergarten readers with those of children who entered kindergarten but could not read. One hundred thirty children were identified as readers and 130 children were randomly selected from each of the readiness and non-readiness groups in the Madison, Wisconsin public schools. A…

An informal survey of Hawaiian school teachers and administrators revealed a considerable variance among communities in the type of problems mentioned. A model was formulated to specify the characteristics of the communities in the hope of discovering a basis for allocating future program resources. The model consists of two dimensions: density of…

The question of what secondary school can do to cope with the large number of poor readers, the high relationship between dropouts and reading abilities, the widely varying abilities within the classrooms, and the increasing lack of interest in reading among young people is discussed. A secondary language arts program for nonacademic students that…

The need for experts from related disciplines to aid in learning diagnosis and prognosis is discussed. While support for a multi-causation theory of reading disability has been general for many years, it has not led to action, as reflected in the lack of an interdisciplinary approach to learning disabilities in many schools, reading centers, and…