This paper reports some of the preliminary findings of an investigation of the ways in which married couples experience pregnancy. Demographic, historical, personal, and marital information was gathered through individual interviews with each prospective parent. The 57 variables measured were combined to make six clusters: (1) experience of…

The purpose of the document is to assess facilitating and interfering effects of various strategies in samples of children from elementary and high school grade levels. Participating in the paired-associate study were 160 children, 40 each from first, third, sixth, and eleventh grades. Subjects were required to learn a 36-item aurally presented…

Videotapes were used to determine disruptive versus relevant student behavior exhibited (1) with teachers trained under the Oral Language Program (OLP) implemented by the Southwest Cooperative Educational Laboratory and (2) with non-OLP teachers. Five categories of disruptive behaviors--gross motor, noise making, verbalization, orienting, and…

The bibliography on learning in mentally handicapped persons is divided into the following topic categories: applied behavior change, classical conditioning, discrimination, generalization, motor learning, reinforcement, verbal learning, and miscellaneous. An author index is included. (KW)

Six research studies involving computer assisted instruction (CAI) are reported. "Gradient and Full-Response Feedback in Computer-Assisted Instructions" did not substantiate the hypothesized advantages of gradient-response over full response feedback on the basis of amount learned (n=24). "Relative Effectiveness of Various Modes of Stimulus…

PLANIT (Programming Language for Interactive Teaching) is a general purpose teaching system that allows a lesson designer to enter course content into the computer for use as a teaching device. The user (lesson designer or student) communicates with the system via a keyboard. Interacting with PLANIT, he can build and edit lessons, present lessons,…

This paper presents research into the characteristics of low-income families in the Portland, Oregon area. The contention is made that the learning behavior of children from these families is affected by their pre-school and early school experiences, which may be unsatisfactory in preparing them to learn. Three types of aberrations may affect…

Under the subject contract, a program was undertaken with the object of identifying the effectiveness of equivalent response learning techniques in the human learning process, with special attention to the potentialities for training and retraining of unemployed youths, older workers, and disadvantaged sections of the population. The experiment…

Psychological researchers should deal with the concrete stimulus-response principles of learning on which behavior is based, and study behaviors that are representative of real life behaviors. The present research strategy has come from two faulty ideas: first, a concern with underlying, inferred mental processes, rather than with actual tasks or…

Four selected scales from the Learning Environment Inventory (LEI) were rewritten to measure the students' individual perceptions of their classroom environment, rather than their estimates of the opinions of the class as a whole. Both scales were then administered to 10 7th grade math classes and 4 10th grade social studies classes. The rewritten…

This study investigated attribute by treatment interactions between prior familiarity and response mode to programmed materials for college level subjects by manipulating subjects' familiarity. The programs were a revised version of Diagnosis of Myocardial Infraction in standard format and in a reading version. Materials to familiarize subjects…

An examinee is required to express his confidence in the correctness of each choice of a multiple-choice item in a probabilistic test. For the responses to be valid indicators the confidence expressed in each choice should be determined by an examinees' knowledge. This study assessed the relationship of the certainty of examinees' responses to…

Second- and fourth-grade children learned two 25-item, paired-associate mixed lists under three experimental conditions: instructed imagery, imposed imagery, and control. Four specific transfer paradigms and a reference paradigm were represented in the lists. The specific transfer paradigms were constructed such that a first list stimulus term (a…

Confrontation, or aggressive verbal behavior, has been defended as a rhetorical tactic by some communication theorists on five bases: biological, psychological, sociological, rhetorical, and intellectual. Proponents of "rhetorical sensitivity," however, differ from those who would accept confrontation uncritically. Confrontation is not…

Theories of mass communication have sought to explain how the media function internally and affect society. Rather than additional "response" studies, which investigate the impact of media on behavior or a society's impact on its media, more research should center on the functions of mass media within the overall framework of communication theory.…