Part of a larger investigation of teacher-child-peer interactions among two- and three-year-old children in day care, this microanalytic study of toddler-initiated bids (attempts to communicate with caregivers) and teacher responses depicts in detail toddler-caregiver interaction. Subjects for the study were 25 males and 25 females between the…

This paper reports a cross-sectional, developmental study of the fluidity of children's mental functioning (representational skills) in contexts involving the representational use of blocks. Data were collected from a sample of 40 children from a laboratory school: 20 four-year-olds and 20 seven-year-olds, with an equal number of boys and girls in…

This paper discusses the historical background of the creationist movement, presents Federal Judge Overton's analysis of why and how the Creationists got the equal time evolution/creation teaching law passed in Arkansas, and examines how scientists and educators are reacting to the controversy. Creationists were set back when Overton declared…

The conflict theory of decision making was examined by testing a conflict model which differentiated among three basic coping patterns in response to decisional conflict, i.e., defensive avoidance, panic, and vigilance. Male college students (N=53) were administered two decisional problems, "The Changing Work Procedures Case" and…

A promising avenue for characterizing individuals lies in an examination of the antecedents of recorded behaviors. Autobiographical information from college students was used as an alternative to traditional personality methodology to demonstrate the scientific utility of biodata. The traits selected for investigation were positive and negative…

Twenty constructs about writing instruction were identified in a study during which 93 teachers responded to and free-sorted 80 statements about the teaching of writing. A latent partition analysis was applied in order to summarize the data and to make apparent the major similarities in all the teachers' categorizations. Some of the identified…

Many middle-aged children care for their aging parents, i.e., they both care for and care about the parent(s). The emotional and cognitive responses of middle-aged children to their aged parents or parents-in-law were examined through interviews with 51 middle-aged adults. Responses were analyzed to determine the level, type and range of concerns…

These four learning modules present text and exercises designed to help allied health students understand various elements of positive interaction with people. The first module, "Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs" by Dianne Mackey, defines human needs, presents Maslow's theories, and helps the learner identify behaviors that reflect the…

The effectiveness of a strategy for improving performance on multiple choice items for examinees with different levels of test anxiety was assessed. Undergraduate measurement students responded to the Mandler-Sarason Test Anxiety Scale and to an objective test covering course content. Results indicated that, for most examinees, generation of an…

Robert Bloom considers the difficulties faced by teachers of disturbed and disruptive adolescents. He depicts common situations in which the teacher experiences anxiety, is unaware of the personal stress and conflict, and reacts in inappropriate ways. Examples portray such reactions as anger at coworkers, envy of the young, and retreat into…

Criterion-referenced testing is an important area in the theory and practice of educational measurement. This study demonstrated that even these tests must be closely examined for construct validity. The dimensionality of a dataset will be affected by the examinee's cognitive processes as well as by the nature of the content domain. The methods of…

The differences in responses of grade 6 boys and girls to selected items on a standardized test are examined. Data are the responses of approximately 36,000 children during 1978-79 to two test forms of the California Assessment Program's Survey of Basic Skills: Grade 6 (SBS:6). Performance on specific arithmetic items is studied and involves the…

What effect varying the phrasing of attitude statements would have across sex and grade was determined. Three content parallel forms were developed to assess student attitudes toward integration. Each form contained 15 items and differed only in terms of item phrasing either positive, negative or a combination of both. Six hundred and twenty-two,…

Teachers actively engaged in responding to their students' written narratives should be mindful of the many influences on their students' writing, including the abuses of the language by government bureaucracies and the media. Examples of these abuses are (1) the lack of density and direction or purpose in bureaucratic writing, (2) the disjointed,…

Purposes of this study are to determine the effects of (1) preassessed dimensional salience upon performance in a bi-dimensional matching task, and (2) pretraining conditions expected to facilitate bi-dimensional processing. An additional aim was to elucidate a model of development involving changing salience hierarchies by comparing the effects…