This document presents a practicum designed to address the problems encountered when a child in nondirective play therapy becomes able to express emotions and parents, unable to accept their child's new expressions of anger, withdraw the child from therapy at a time when he or she is most vulnerable. The development and implementation of a program…

In the interest of applying reader response theory to journalism this paper posits that readers of newspapers, like readers of literature, take an active role in making meaning from the articles they read, rather than passively accepting news as a finished, static product. Additionally, it proposes that journalism textbooks pay little attention to…

Intended for literature instructors, this digest explains the relationship of transactional theory (a reciprocal, mutually defining relationship between the reader and the literary text) to the teaching of literature. The importance of the reader's part in literature is first demonstrated, noting that attention must be paid to who the readers are,…

To learn more about how people read literary texts, with a view to improving the way literature is taught in schools, a study examined the extent to which the reading of literature is affected by variations in readers, texts, and situations. Subjects, 12 skilled (faculty) readers and 96 novice (undergraduate) readers, read a short story, either in…

This paper explores an alternative way of studying journalism in the classroom by focusing on contemporary journalists' ironic treatment of morality. The paper examines the performative character of the language of news, when the words investigative journalists use are of interest not so much for what they say but for what they do. The paper…

Two techniques for detecting differential item functioning (DIF) of test items are compared: (1) item response theory (IRT), using the three-parameter model; and (2) Mantel-Haenszel chi square techniques (MHCS). The steps necessary for identifying differentially functioning items are identified for both approaches. Using data from the 1988…

The appropriateness of using time limits when measuring students' competence is questionable. This study assessed whether students who had failed the College Level Academic Skills Test (CLAST) could improve their performance if they were allowed additional time on retaking the test. Subjects were 641 students who took the CLAST from fall 1982…

A selection of romances from medieval literature can be used successfully in undergraduate literature classes to trace the appearance and relevance of medieval themes, motifs, and characters in works of modern poetry, fiction, and film. New scholarly editions, historiographies, translations, and modernizations give both teachers and students more…

A "special themes in literature" course about illness and disability was designed to help future nurses to understand the human, rather than the clinical, dimensions of impairment and its effects on the sufferer as well as the sufferer's family, associates, and community. The objectives of the course were to look at such matters as…

An analysis was conducted of 12 fourth-grade science and social studies lessons in which a textbook was used as a focus of instruction. The purpose was to determine how the textbook was used by teachers and students, and in particular, to determine what kinds of questions the teachers asked during the textbook-based lessons. The results replicate…

The methods used by E. L. Thorndike, L. L. Thurstone, and G. Rasch to address issues related to item-invariant measurement and the scoring of individual performance are compared. The analyses highlight the close connection among the three methods, and suggest that progress in measurement theory reflects the movement from essentially ad hoc methods…

The issue of parallel forms is of paramount importance for producers of standardized tests. With increasing emphasis being placed on standardized test results it is necessary that each student achieve the same standard score regardless of the form he or she was administered. In the case of the American College Testing (ACT) Assessment Program,…

An honors seminar at Bloomsburg University (Pennsylvania) investigated the story of Jesus as it has evolved in different media over nearly two millennia. Initially the students studied two gospels with contrasting versions of the life of Jesus, in order to explore the process whereby oral material is transcribed into written form by different…

In this study interactive teaching of two math teachers at elementary schools in Spain was observed. Focus was on the description of the principles of the practice which guide the teaching activities of the subjects, because it was felt these principles form the base of teachers' theories with respect to the teaching and the students. During a…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether item difficulty is significantly affected by language difficulty and response set convergence. Language difficulty was varied by increasing sentence (stem) length, increasing syntactic complexity, and substituting uncommon words for more familiar terms in the item stem. Item wording ranged from…