To determine the relationship between age and risk taking for community college students, 74 male and 72 female students, ranging from 18-79 years of age, took a vocabulary test in which six "nonsense" items were interspersed among 54 legitimate items (following Slakter's procedure). Test instructions explained a penalty would be levied for…

Longitudinal studies of test wiseness (TW) were conducted to determine: (1) the relationship between TW and grade level, (2) the relationship between TW and sex, and (3) the stability of TW. Aspects of TW observed included stem cue and specific determiner identification and usage and the elimination of similar and absurd options. Subjects were…

A cognitive appraisal of threat is believed to intervene between the appearance of a stressful stimulus and a stress reaction to the stimulus. The effect of a "rational" treatment on the appraisal of threat is investigated. Five groups of 13 college students each heard one of five treatment orientations before viewing slides showing the victims of…

This paper considers many aspects of children's response to literature. Among the topics discussed are factors within the child (related to age, sex, and intelligence) that teachers and researchers agree may affect a child's enjoyment of literature; a research study on the relationship between story content and a child's psychological and…

From a special 8-part series, describing the individual summer experiences of 79 typical elementary teachers.

The use of touch in therapeutic relationships is seldom dealt with as a practice issue except in a proscriptive way. To gather descriptive information on the use of touch in therapy, professional therapists (N=50) whose practice was largely family therapy were interviewed about the successful use of touch in their helping relationships. Interview…

A model of the teaching-learning process identifies and describes varied behavioral dimensions of the classroom and how they relate to pupil achievement. The model is based on the assumption that the total amount of engaged time on a particular topic is the most important determinant of achievement and has the components of: (1) quantity of…

A study was conducted to determine the extent and nature on non-respondent bias in the follow-up survey in 1981 of Michigan secondary vocational education students from the class of 1980. The response rate to the annual survey has been approximately 76 percent in past years, yet there remains a significant non-response bias potential. This study,…

The effects of labels, "mentally retarded" and "institutionalized" on the evaluations and causal attributions of nonretarded persons, and on the social distance preferences of EMR persons, were assessed. In addition, each group was asked to predict the likelihood of a labeled (mentally retarded) or a nonlabeled target person achieving success at a…

A review of the research indicates that the interface between the findings from research on teaching and staff development of teachers is an important but neglected one. An improvement in teaching skills calls for an interactive or collaborative mode of professional development which is based on classroom interests and the needs of teachers, with…

The study determined the correlation among education students' perceptions of their own childhood discipline and their adult attitudes toward teaching and toward children. Data analysis indicated that those students who perceived their own childhood discipline as rigid and punitive tended to hold highly negative attitudes toward children, but did…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether it would be possible to equate rights-scored to formula-scored tests without causing a discontinuity in the meaning of the score scale. Several other subsidiary studies--of the characteristics of the two scoring methods, of nonresponse and guessing, and of reliability and parallelism--were also…

An attributional approach to social behavior traces problems in personal adjustment back to the assumptions individuals formulate about the causes of behaviors and events. Attributional information presented during counseling may have therapeutically beneficial consequences. The effectiveness of attribution therapy was investigated in a factorial…

This research discusses the probability of child witnesses providing a complete and accurate description of an event. Children have been regarded as particularly inaccurate, highly suggestible, and basically unreliable in court cases. Psychologists have concluded that younger children are much more suggestible than older children or adults, and a…

The relationship between empathic role-taking abilities and empathic behaviors observed in both naturalistic and experimental settings was examined in 14 children between the ages of 53 and 65 months. Children were observed at the McGill Daycare Centre twice a week for 8 weeks, totalling approximately 30 hours. Event sampling was used to record…