This paper briefly reviews studies pertaining to the imitation of facial gestures in early infancy. It is suggested that imitation provides for the initiation of a reciprocal exchange between mother and infant, but does not sustain such an interaction, since this requires a continually varied and changing pattern of gestures. Thus there is an…

A college expository writing instructor investigated how students perceive teacher intervention during the writing process and how written teacher comments affect successive drafts of student compositions. During the semester, four students were asked to react on tape to the comments the instructor wrote on the second drafts of their compositions…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the difference in cognitive and affective responses of eighth grade students to a short, educational film and to a videotape presentation of that film. The cognitive response involved students' understanding of such story elements of the film as plot, setting, character, mood, and theme. The affective…

Teaching styles can be considered from two approaches--the life style approach and the spectrum approach. The first is a relatively static approach borrowed from management research and organizational development. It identifies teaching styles based on Maslow's (1970) hierarchy of human needs. Teaching styles are seen as the interpersonal styles…

It has been suggested that egotistical attributions for success and failure are mediated by the affective reactions resulting from achievement outcomes. To establish the motivational impact of failure-related affect on subsequent ego-defensive attributions, an excitation transfer paradigm was used to manipulate the negative feelings elicited by…

The five observational studies reported in this paper provide consistent and interlocking testimony for the view that moral events differ qualitatively from social conventional events, and that these two aspects of the social world are associated with qualitatively differing individual-environment interactions. Each of the five studies focuses on…

One of the major assumptions of latent trait theory is that the items in a test measure a single dimension. This report describes an investigation of procedures for forming a set of items that meet this assumption. Factor analysis, nonmetric multidimensional scaling, cluster analysis and latent trait analysis were applied to simulated and real…

Judgments that favorably set an individual apart from others tend to be made more rapidly, suggesting that the self-concept is both an effective and a cognitive entity. Subjects rated the self-applicability of traits on a 100-point scale. As in other studies using dichotomous judgements, judgement speed increased with increasing self-applicability…

In the school, concern about individual differences is still reserved almost exclusively for students, while professional personnel are being limited by assigned role functions, role expectations, performance, and criteria. One reason for this situation is that a power elite model of decision making is prevalent in today's schools. Another reason…

Patterns of cautiousness in a prose learning task were examined in three age groups of adults representing three levels of educational experience. Types of instruction, order of material presentation, sex, and educational experience level were varied for all groups of the 90 adults participating in the study. The main findings were as follows: (1)…

Thirty-four preservice teachers listened to children's tape-recorded responses to selected questions. The children were rehearsed to present either relevant and logical (high quality) responses or irrelevant and illogical (low quality) responses. The children also were rehearsed to verbalize either responses that contained selected nonstandard…

All learning takes place through the unification of body and mind. Within the realm of motor skill learning, the term mental practice has been used to explain this phenomenon. It has been found that individuals can use their imaginations to learn and to improve upon their performance. Mental practice can be used by teachers who have too little…

Several approaches have been used to teach basic counseling skills to beginning trainees. A cognitive self-instructional modeling approach was employed with a student pre-practicum class. The treatment group (N=9) received 6 hours of training by observing counselor models, formulating their helping responses aloud, practicing the asking of focused…