A study described the experience, or thoughts, feelings, and motivation of young adolescents reading a novel, with special attention focused on how and when students experience reading positively. Subjects, 24 eighth-grade students of above average reading ability, completed 13 log entries while reading "Good-Night, Mr. Tom," a novel…

A study examined the effect of an alternative language arts program designed to encourage children to take up reading and writing in ways that they find personally, socially, and politically relevant. Throughout a school year, the development of the alternative language arts program in a third/fourth grade classroom in an urban school was…

This study analyzed girls' reactions to Disney's animated feature film "Pocahontas" in light of conclusions drawn from a previous critical textual analysis of the movie. The research addressed three questions: (1) how do Disney's claims to creation of positive prosocial representations of women and Native Americans in the movie…

The Maryland School Performance Assessment Program (MSPAP) is a relatively new, statewide performance assessment of students in grades 3, 5, and 8. When first administered in May of 1991, the MSPAP included a battery of performance assessment tasks designed to generate written or drawn responses to reading texts. This study evaluated selected…

Many state and local entities are developing and using performance assessment programs. Because these initiatives are so diverse, it is very difficult to understand what they are doing, or to compare them in any meaningful way. Multiple-choice tests are contrasted with performance assessments, and preliminary classifications are suggested to…

A study investigated the development of theme as five fifth-grade students read children's literature, recorded their responses in logs, and discussed their ideas in small, student-led peer groups. The five students met together as one group over the course of 5 weeks as they read historical fiction focused on Japan during World War II. Data…

Yale's Cooke Teaching Program is designed to diminish the sense of imperviousness and immobility that the university often conveys to its surrounding community. During the academic year, one Yale graduate student attended a high school senior honors English class twice weekly. It was an advanced class (mostly minorities), many were college-bound,…

The subject of this dissertation is the examination of differential item functioning (DIF) through the use of loglinear Rasch models with latent classes. DIF refers to the probability that a correct response among equally able test takers is different for various racial, ethnic, and gender groups. Because usual methods of detecting DIF give little…

How teachers' judgments about student literacy behavior were analyzed under the Rasch model is described. The analysis was done to assist staff of the Western Australian Department of Education to revise aspects of a literacy program called "First Steps" for the early years of school. First Steps uses a developmental continuum of small…

This study presents a formative evaluation of "The Intelligent Physics Tutor," an interactive software program designed to improve high school physics students' problem-solving skills. The purposes of this evaluation were to describe how the "Tutor" was used in the pilot high school class; to determine teacher and student…

The Advertising section of the proceedings contains the following 11 papers: "How to Systematically Design and Develop a Mastery-Based Advertising Skills Course" (Elaine L. Wagner and Andrea T. Smith); "Tolerance for Television Advertising" (W. James Potter and Walter Gantz); "Quenching the Thirst for Personal Information:…

Participatory evaluation is an assessment approach that involves the participants of a study from beginning to end. The evaluation strategy was implemented in a public school district to assess teacher involvement in decisionmaking, determine whether teachers desire more participation, and evaluate the assessment strategy itself. Data were…

This report is the culmination of a project that assessed the status of arts education in the public schools in Indiana. Detailed information on Indiana's total arts education program, including the areas of music, visual art, theater and dance education, was solicited by a comprehensive mail survey. An executive summary states that: arts literacy…

A study outlined the processes through which two beginning elementary teachers in the San Francisco Bay area learned to overcome institutional constraints which tended to standardize ethnically diverse students' responses to literature. The study focused specifically on the changes in one teacher's instruction which freed her third/fourth grade…

It is generally recognized that students' feelings about learning affect their ability to learn. One of the three strongest influencing factors on second-language learning is classroom anxiety. This paper focuses on student emotional distress in the English as a second language (ESL) classroom, and suggests that one of the primary causes of this…