This study investigated the extent to which school experience affects the perceptions and practices of teachers of gifted/talented children. A group of teachers with experience of school programs for gifted/talented children was compared with a group that had not been involved in any special programs. The experienced group showed greater…

In the spirit of the postmodern movement, this paper mixes the genres of survey research, in-depth interviews, and textual analysis to comment on governance in the media age. Using these methods, the paper traces the movement of a particular issue, international child abductions, on the agendas of the press, the public, and policy elites.…

Item banks, large sets of test items, can be used for the construction of achievement tests. Mathematical programming models have been proposed for the selection of items from an item bank for a test. These models make automated test construction possible. However, to find an optimal or even an approximate optimal solution to a test construction…

This booklet provides mental health professionals with an analytic framework for understanding psychosocial reactions to bereavement of adults and children and for selecting appropriate intervention strategies. It also identifies those people most likely to need the intervention of a mental health professional to help prevent or mitigate…

To honor the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Louise M. Rosenblatt's book "Literature as Exploration," this book offers 12 essays that demonstrate the extraordinary influence of Rosenblatt's work on the teaching of literature, on literary theory, and on educational research in all English-speaking countries. Further, it evinces…

Testimony concerning the proposed Regulatory Impact on Student Excellence Act (RISE), a bill to assist schools in improving student performance, is reported. The text of the bill is given in full. It begins with Congress's finding that: (1) public school teachers are currently spending more time on regulatory paperwork; (2) many teachers have…

In an effort to improve the ways in which words are learned, the Johnson O'Connor Research Foundation (JOCRF) is attempting to determine the difficulty level of all non-technical words in the English language. This item banking project entails: (1) identifying words that should be calibrated; (2) writing a test item for each word; (3) testing the…

A study examined the differences in the essay exam scores of college students who did no planning, some planning, or extensive planning before writing answers to questions on essay exams. Subjects, 100 undergraduate education students enrolled in reading methods classes and 37 graduate reading students enrolled in a psychology of reading class,…

The contention of this paper is that logicality and emotionality are not two poles of a continuum but orthogonal dimensions which may exist to varying degrees in an argument. It was hypothesized that: (1) logicality and emotionality would be perceived as independent components by subject; and (2) messages high in logic would have more influence on…

This study compared listener response to normal and deafened speakers, and attempted to identify: (1) the basic types of judgments that underlie listeners' responses and those that are likely to be abnormal when the speaker is deafened; and (2) the features of speech responsible for particular reaction types. Subjects were 47 moderately to…

Given the importance of pupil control in the school's social system, it would seem reasonable to predict a significant relationship between educators' pupil control ideology and their reactions to disruptive behavior incidents. This study examines whether humanistically oriented educators would prefer to levy less punitive measures on disruptive…

Factors affecting a lower-bound estimate of internal consistency reliability, Cronbach's coefficient alpha, are explored. Theoretically, coefficient alpha is an estimate of the correlation between two tests drawn at random from a pool of items like the items in the test under consideration. As a practical matter, coefficient alpha can be an index…

Because newspapers have begun switching from evening to morning publication with increasing frequency, a study investigated subscriber response to change in publication time and in subscriber behavior over time. In follow-up to an earlier study on subscriber reactions to the conversion to morning publication of the weekday Eugene (Oregon)…

A study was conducted to determine how a population viewed the prospect of receiving news and information electronically. Subjects were 529 students attending Stanford University (California) in the heart of the "Silicon Valley" computer industry. The survey was conducted by mail with a telephone follow-up, and included 108 questions on usage of…

This investigation of the impact of feedback upon scrambled discourse was intended to show the effects of idiosyncratic processing and to provide a more sensitive indicator of feedback usefulness. Learner schemata, text organization, and feedback strategies interact in processing discourse, although past research has favored limited models…