Questionnaires were mailed to 261 agencies involved in public relations and publicity services, 56 agencies involved in advertising, and public relations directors of 183 corporations and other nonagency organizations in order to determine the knowledge and skill areas important to agency and organizational public relations employers. In an effort…

Defining reading as a constructive process involving an interaction of the reader, the text, and the context, this paper offers a model of student cognitive processing that incorporates research in reading, thinking, teaching, and instructional materials. The first section of the paper provides the theoretical context for developing the model,…

In two phases, this study examined age-related changes in children's knowledge about two familiar domains and how these domains are organized in permanent memory. Forty 5-year-olds and 40 7-year-olds from a small academic community generated exemplars from the animal and cartoon character domains and provided information about sets of animals and…

It is becoming increasingly important to teach students higher-order thinking skills in addition to mere factual knowledge. Recent scientific and technological advances offer significant opportunities to implement more effective teaching of these skills. By investigating intellectual processes, cognitive science has led to a significantly better…

To determine people's use of media during the 1984 presidential campaign, telephone interviews were conducted with 630 heads of households in Dane County, Wisconsin. It was hypothesized that persons with different political orientations would have significantly different media use and attention patterns. The data analysis proceeded in two stages.…

To gain a perspective on the kinds of people who find newspapers and television to be high or low in credibility, a two-phase study combined demographic and other characteristics, media behavior, and attitudes toward the media. The first phase involved a series of focused group discussions, while the second was a national, representative sampling…

A study investigated the readability of current laws for Canadian francophones and anglophones. The 63 subjects were asked to read a variety of brief legal texts available in parallel styles in both languages and to answer questions about the texts' content. Subjects were also surveyed about their preference for a formal or vulgarized style of…

The impact of interest on specific quantitative and qualitative measures was studied by examining the relationship between interest in research methodology by education students and knowledge in the area. The "Study Interest Questionnaire" (Winteler and Sierwald, 1987) and a questionnaire on interest in empirical research methodology were…

The recent interest in reflective teaching has resulted in a number of studies in which reflective teaching is proposed as an important aim to be achieved through teacher education programs. Programs for the development of reflective teaching have been proposed, however, attempts at clarifying the meaning of reflective teaching have been scarce.…

Cumulative school records kept on children generally contain only standardized test scores and random notes concerning conduct, yet some theorists suggest that one of the most powerful tools of assessment is teachers' daily observation. To determine teachers' capability for evaluating their students' reading, a study examined teachers' informal…

The Teacher Education and Learning to Teach Study of the National Center for Research on Teacher Education combines case studies of teacher education programs with longitudinal studies of teacher learning. In this paper, the development of the theoretical framework on which instrumentation for the longitudinal study is based is discussed.…

A secondary analysis of data collected by Thomas Patterson during the 1976 presidential campaign was made to test three hypotheses: (1) respondents in a media-rich environment will show higher levels of political information holding than respondents in a media-poor environment, (2) differences in information holding levels between a media-rich…

As data on the reliability and validity of ratings of infant temperament have accumulated, researchers have begun to ask what caregiver ratings really measure. An argument has been made that ratings of social behavior are less a reflection of enduring individual differences than a measure of rater characteristics and error variance. This study…

The development of children's understanding of the learning process and factors that affect learning was explored with a sample of 18 children from 6 to 13 years of age. Subjects were interviewed, and three levels of their reasoning were identified. The 6- to 7-year-old subjects viewed learning as "doing" and reasoned that…

Two experiments were performed on two different populations of preschool children with a mean age of 4.5 years. One group was enrolled in a half-day nursery school program and the other attended a full-day program. A microcomputer and age-appropriate software were placed in each classroom according to the following schedule of treatment weeks:…