The purpose of this study is to examine the organization of play space and the effect which this organization has on children's productive and disruptive behavior in an indoor nursery setting. A second purpose was to develop a category system for recording the productive and disruptive behavior of young children in a free play situation. The…

This paper describes an ecological observational study of social interaction and cognitive socialization in family day care. The study employs a reciprocal model which analyzes effects of the caregiver on the child and of the child on the caregiver by comparing the interaction of the same caregiver with "own" and "other"…

This booklet describes a model and an observation system developed for use in comparing the basic elements of various individualized programs. The model identifies three basic elements contained in all individualized instructional programs--pacing, materials and activities, and objectives--and relates them to decision-making and the degree of…

This address presents a discussion of the rationale, procedures, reliability, and validity of the "Social and Nonsocial Executive Skills Profile." The skills profile was developed to identify and measure aspects of the preschool child's classroom behavior that are highly related to social and nonsocial competence. Executive competence is defined…

In this study an attempt was made to measure variables which were expected to be related to individual differences in infants' social responsiveness toward strangers. The subjects were 48 infants (24 boys and 24 girls) between 8 and 13 months of age. Most were children of Cornell University faculty or graduate students, but a broad range of…

In its first year, this program trained 18 experienced teachers and 36 teacher aides. The program was devised to meet the needs of teachers in areas where handicapped and educationally disadvantaged children are placed in regular classrooms. It was also intended to train adults from disadvantaged groups as teacher aides, thus making use of their…

The work completed to date on the development and validation of a procedure for assessing the micro-environments of preschool children is summarized. It was speculated that the lack of evidence that compensatory programs facilitate developmental changes in children might be due to actual lack of influence by the programs, to the subtlety of the…

The development of an instrument for evaluating cognitive growth in preprimary children by means of observational techniques is reported. Areas of growth in pre-mathematic skills were defined for this purpose as: Imitating, recognizing, classifying, matching, comparing, understanding, counting, computing, and measuring. Each is described, and…

Three unproven assumptions may account for the expository teaching used in new social studies which are designed for inductive teaching. 1) It is assumed that teachers and pupils ask questions of a high cognitive level, whereas research and informal observation support the opposite view. 2) Discovery learning requires a pure inductive strategy. 3)…

The training and supervision of teaching assistants in German at Indiana University is summarized. Training through orientation, course work, teaching, visitation, and observation is outlined. Special attention is directed to group observation techniques. The use of video tape recordings and veteran teaching assistants to improve the effectiveness…

The objective of naturalistic observations conducted in schools and homes in the inner city was to relate teacher expectation to pupil behavior. Following kindergarten observations, selected black children predicted as potentially successful and black children predicted as poor achievers were observed in their homes along with their mothers. This…

Reported is the development and field testing of the Science Classroom Observation Form (SCOF), an instrument focusing on the interactive characteristics among students, the environment, and teacher in elementary and junior high school science classrooms. This instrument was developed to be used in research investigations of openness and inquiry…

The results of the classroom observations of students during compensatory reading instruction are described. Sixty-three second-, fourth-, and sixth-grade classrooms across the country were observed using the Student Observation Scale. The scale is two-dimensional enabling an observer to code simultaneously two different aspects of an observed…

This study was designed to determine whether regular Head Start teachers trained as "experimenters" could produce two different teaching modes (combinations of techniques) in two consecutive sessions, using the same lesson content. Each of six Head Start teachers was asked to teach a 10-minute classification lesson to four children,…

The objective of the project was to develop two coding systems, one on teaching strategies and one on pupil involvement in classroom activities. Videotape sequences served as test data for refining the categories. Codings were analyzed for clustering of teaching behaviors into teacher roles and relationships between teacher behavior and pupil…