This document contains 14 papers selected from those presented at the Seventh Annual Conference of the Research Council for Diagnostic and Prescriptive Mathematics. Categorized as interdisciplinary studies are reports on "Mathematics as an Activity of Our Intelligence" by Skemp and a study on "The Brain Basis of Developing…

Repetitions in children's oral reading are typically thought of as disruptive, signalling the kind of careless reading symptomatic of random eye movement or inattention to context. This perspective, however, runs contrary to clinical experiences, which have revealed that many repetitions are deliberate and benefit the reader by serving at least…

Outside the core grammar, the set of "peripheral" or marked properties of a language include exceptions or relaxations of the settings of core grammar and the idiosyncratic features of the language governed by particular lexical items. The core/peripheral distinction has direct implications for grammatical development in children. The…

This work studies the difficulties children have solving two-step word problems of a given structure (e.g., 7 lollypops/2 chocolate bars X 6 chocolate bars). Thirty-six children between the ages of 9 and 14 years were individually observed solving problems of the above type. Other tasks, repetition of the problem and model recognition, were used…

Cognitive perspective-taking has attracted considerable attention in the mainstream developmental literature, and is most commonly studied under the rubric of Theory of Mind. The current article reviews the levels of understanding of informational states that are believed to underlie cognitive perspective-taking from this conceptual framework. An…

Results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and other large scale tests are often reported as rank ordered lists showing mean values for each of the 50 states. Using data from the 2003 State NAEP Assessment, this paper examines the standard errors associated with State NAEP scores and explains why the use of rank order…

An examination of the effectiveness of EA, CA, and students' perception of difficulty in predicting and explaining language learning difficulties. (RM)

A detailed error analysis was performed on spontaneous and elicited speech samples of Anglo second graders learning Spanish. The results tended to disconfirm the L to the subpower of 1 = L to the subpower of 2 hypothesis that first and second language acquisition follow identical patterns. However, evidence suggests that genuine similarities do…

This report illustrates procedures of item construction for addition and subtraction examples involving decimal fractions. Using a procedural network of skills required to solve such examples, an item characteristic matrix of skills analysis was developed to describe the characteristics of the content domain by projected student difficulties. Then…

This paper, presented at the 1979 meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), investigates student errors in high school mathematics. A conceptual framework of hypothetical information-handling processes such as procedures, frames, retrieval from memory, visually-moderated sequences (VMS sequences), the integrated sequence,…

Three procedures used to control Type I error rate in stepwise regression analysis are forward selection, backward elimination, and true stepwise. In the forward selection method, a model of the dependent variable is formed by choosing the single best predictor; then the second predictor which makes the strongest contribution to the prediction of…

The possibility that "coder drift" may be a source of bias in classroom observation systems was investigated in two parallel experiments using the Flanders System of Interaction Analysis. Coder drift may be described as the differences in coding which result when observers create their own idiosyncratic systems of classifying teacher…

The results of two experiments support the hypothesis of "coder drift" which is defined as change that takes place while trained coders are using a system for a number of classroom observation sessions. The coding system used was a modification of the low-inference Flanders System of Interaction Analysis which calls for assigning…

Work on the development of a phonics test that will be incorporated into a total word identification test battery has continued for several years. A prototype of the test was developed in winter 1977, and a revised version was administered in spring 1978. Analysis of this test data revealed several problems, and new criteria for the test were…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the differences in reading strategies between good and poor readers in the first, second, third, and fifth grades. Three patterns of students' oral reading errors were analyzed on the Gray Oral Reading test. For the first pattern, occurrence of visually similar and grammatically acceptable errors,…