The St. Louis Vocabulary Development Project was developed to help children cope with the increasing vocabulary demands in content area textbooks encountered in the fourth grade. The project was presented over the school radio system for 30 minutes daily, 3 days weekly, for 30 weeks in about 150 schools. The fifth and sixth graders were taught…

The post mortem item-examinee sampling investigation described herein explored the feasibility of using item-examinee sampling to estimate scale values denoting degree of affect toward stimuli when measured by the method of paired-comparisons. Results indicate clearly that such scale values can be approximated satisfactorily through item-examinee…

Similarities were noted between techniques used in a new curriculum method, "Structural Communication," and research techniques used to study the relationship between "subjective organization" and recall of word lists. To explore these similarities, 8 groups of 24 high school students read instruction units under different…

Two studies are reported in which the relative difficulty of the utilization of two response strategies, matching and oddity, was assessed. Subjects for the first study were children ages 5-7, 8-10, and 11-13 years; in the second study, college adults were tested. Generally, subjects took more trials to learn matching problems than oddity…

Four experiments comparing behavior of children from Los Angeles, California, and Nuevo San Vicente, Baja California, Mexico, were conducted to analyze cooperative and competitive behavior of Anglo American city and Mexican rural children. Eighty children from each setting, 40 of age 7-9 and 40 of age 10-11, equally divided by sex, served as…

Four experimental Super 8 mm sound motion picture films were designed and produced for presentation in a 2x2x2 factorial research model to test the effects of mode of response and stimulus conditions in films for preschool children. Subjects were 40 children (22 males and 18 females) in a Headstart Program in San Pedro, California, divided so that…

Following up on an earlier study which found that blacks and whites differed significantly on a 54-item development scale designed to measure effective individual functioning, or "maturity," this report considers whether the content of the Psychosocial Maturity Scale (PSM) is biased in favor of white children and if this bias invalidates…

This study examined how relevant cues given by an experimenter might differentially affect the performance of task versus socially oriented children on two games. On the basis of past research, two independent variables were chosen: field dependence-independence and sex. It was expected that field-dependent children and girls would tend to be more…

The effects of immediate knowledge of results (KR) concerning the correctness or incorrectness of each item response on a computer-administered test of verbal ability were investigated. The effects of KR were examined on a 50-item conventional test and a stradaptive ability test and in high- and low-ability groups. The primary dependent variable…

This paper summarizes results of an ecological analysis designed to generate hypotheses concerning processes involved in learning to meet the demands of the classroom environment. Ethnographic data on student teachers indicates that classrooms are characterized by multidimensionality, simultaneity, and unpredictability. Teachers, in turn,…

This book explores some of the basic principles of behavior which have been derived from the study of operant conditioning and considers the phenomenon of sport in society in the light of these principles. First, some of the terms used in Skinnerian behavioral analysis are defined and explained. The second section examines the reinforcements…

Various research studies concerned with the feedback from proprioceptors which accompany movement and the way in which this information is relevant to the control of activity are brought together in this volume. It is intended for the use of those who have some basic knowledge of human anatomy and physiology as well as an acquaintance with…

Effects of logically weighting incorrect item options in conventional tests and different scoring functions with confidence tests on reliability and validity were examined. Ninth graders took conventionally administered Verbal and Mathematical Reasoning tests, scored conventionally and by a procedure assigning degree-of-correctness weights to…

A comparison of reliability and validity was made for three testing procedures: 1) responding conventionally to Verbal Ability and Mathematical Reasoning tests; 2) using a confidence weighting response procedure with the same tests; and 3) using the elimination response method. The experimental testing procedures were not psychometrically superior…

A new method of coding verbal interaction was applied to 52 interviews with adults in a general medical screening clinic. "Average interaction profiles" for patients and physicians were determined that give quantitative indices of crucial aspects of the physician-patient relationship, such as the manner in which information is transmitted.…