The results of a survey, comments on the results, and an annotated bibliography are presented in this preliminary study of the impact of federal programs, mandates, and regulations on school principals. The survey involved interviewing 20 principals in urban, suburban, and small-town elementary and secondary schools in the Chicago area about…

A study was conducted to assess the skill of students in identifying meanings of facial expressions in photographs used in the Facial Meaning Sensitivity Test (FMST). Subjects were 55 speech pathology students, 39 nursing students, and 36 speech communication students. The first part of the three part test asked subjects to match 10 photographs…

Six studies which were conducted to determine the effects of testwiseness training on middle school and undergraduate college students' test scores are described. Testwiseness was defined as the cognitive ability or set of skills which a test taker can use to improve his or her score. Testwiseness training presented methods for using deductive…

This report describes the formative evaluation of the first three rough-cut instructional television programs for "On the Level," a series of 12 lessons dealing with personal and social growth for secondary school students. Results discussed are based on viewing three programs in a total of 36 classrooms at sites in Maryland, Tennessee,…

This study investigates the relationship between an examinee's test anxiety level, degree of person fit, and ability. Three major types of person fit indices measure the degree of unusual response patterns: norm comparison indices; goodness-of-fit indices; and extended indices. Five different person fit indices were calculated for the results of…

To determine if an interviewer's orientation toward satisfaction and commitment actually produced different interviewee reactions in these two areas, 20 interviewers conducted an informative and persuasive interview with two different sets of five interviewees (physical education majors). The Conversation Self-Report Inventory (CSRI) was used to…

This article examines the year-long experience of one fourth grade teacher, Anne, as she learned about comprehension strategy instruction and attempted to integrate the approach in her reading program. The goal of the study was to extend current understanding of the factors that support or inhibit an individual teacher's instructional decision…

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is one of the anxiety disorders with particularly debilitating effects due to flashbacks and hypervigilance in daily life. Treatments commonly focus upon either pharmacological or psychotherapeutic modalities, but there is often a need to merge both of these approaches to deal effectively with the somatic, as…

In this position paper, reservations are presented regarding the potential of knowledge management (KM) as it is currently applied to the learning and teaching activity of schools. We contend that effective KM is contingent upon the explication of a deep and shared understanding of the learning and teaching process. We argue that the most…

We are often reminded that we remember little of what we hear and read but much of what we teach. The very act of teaching forces us to clarify our understanding and to process it so that it can be communicated in a structured, clear and accessible way. Here, Heather Scott describes how she got an initially reluctant Year 12 group at Challenge…

Helping students to understand how and why people in the present interpret the past differently is a challenge. It is also vital if we are to develop an understanding of why the meanings we ascribe to the past are not fixed, but rather are subject to our own prejudices or goals. A number of articles in previous editions have explored how students…

This paper outlines and analyzes the important methodological and experimental design considerations uncovered by recent inquiries into the effects of alcohol on human behavior. The major issues discussed include: (1) the need and technique for complete manipulation of subjects' beverage expectancies in conjunction with alcohol and placebo…

This paper concentrates on incidents of severe conflict in eighth-grade classrooms observed in studies of four socially diverse junior high schools in two districts. Severe conflict is generated when teachers violate students' conceptions of the character of legitimate classroom authority. In a cosmopolitan community within an urban complex,…

A set of prevalent emotions, including pity, anger, guilt, pride (self-esteem), gratitude, and resignation, shares a common characteristic, i.e., causal attributions appear to be sufficient antecedents for their elicitation. Research in the field of emotions has shown that the underlying properties or dimensions of attributions are the significant…

Although the recognition of the affective experiences of peers is an important prerequisite for social adaptation, children's ability to recognize peers' facial displays of emotion remains unexamined. To investigate the degree to which young children were able to enact expressions of emotion that were recognizable by peers and adults, and to…