A study was made to determine whether there exists a group of overpersisting children who are considered mastery-oriented because of their persistence but who actually demonstrate characteristics of learned helplessness. Subjects were 71 females and 84 males from fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade classrooms. Children's scores on the Intellectual…

At a workshop exploring practical methods that elementary and secondary teachers may use to analyze texts, three parallel texts were subjected to three forms of analysis: subjective analysis, examination of cohesive ties, and linguistic analysis of selected text variables such as word and sentence length. The subjective ranking of the passages'…

A study determined whether chemical operations specialists at skill level 1 differ in terms of aptitude, job knowledge, job confidence, and perceptions of task difficulty, task importance, task frequency, and task training, depending on whether the specialists are active U.S. Army soldiers or are in the Army Reserve. The subjects for whom complete…

When readability formulas are used to review workbooks and textbooks their value is limited because application techniques have failed to take into consideration the exercises and examples in these books. The O'Hear and Ramsey (OR) Corrective technique has been developed to alleviate this problem. It allows readability data to be used accurately…

A survey of computer scientists was conducted to identify factors that affect software complexity. A total of 160 items were selected from the literature to include in a questionnaire sent to 425 individuals who were employees of computer-related businesses in Lawrence and Kansas City. The items were grouped into nine categories called system…

A new approach to polychotomous scoring of test items, similar to "max-alpha" scaling (MAS) and known as polyweighting, has been developed. Unlike MAS, this new method of polychotomous scoring provides scoring weights for a given item that are independent of the difficulty of other items in the analysis. Moreover, the scoring weights are…

The purpose of this study was twofold: to investigate to what extent characteristics of anchor tests may affect precision of item calibration, and to estimate to what extent precision of item calibration may be affected by removal of persons whose response patterns deviate from those normally expected from the Rasch one-parameter logistic model.…

Research on sex differences in children's achievement orientations has suggested that girls have less confidence in their ability than boys, especially among bright children. To examine how sex differences in achievement orientation vary across achievement levels, 250 fifth grade children completed a questionnaire which assessed their preference…

The purposes of this study were to assess the usefulness of a variety of readability formulas in predicting the relative difficulty of passages, and to explore the contribution of pupils' background to text difficulty. Subjects were 285 special education students in grades 1-9, 117 of whom were based in rural and suburban Minnesota (MN) and 168 of…

Unidimensional item response theory (IRT) is widely used in the analysis and equating of educational achievement tests. If an IRT model is true, item response must be locally independent when the trait is held constant. Several measures of local dependence which are used in conjunction with the three-parameter logistic model in the analysis of…

This study investigates the influence of changes in the wording of simple addition and subtraction problems without affecting their semantic structure on the level of difficulty of those problems for first and second graders and on the nature of their errors. The objective is to contribute to a better understanding of the process of constructing a…

An analysis of the syntax of economics textbooks was undertaken to (1) provide real-language examples of the difficult grammatical structures being taught in an advanced economics reading course, and (2) construct a factual database of the nature of economics textbooks. Five texts representative of those typically used in introductory economics…

The study reported in this paper investigated the effects of a frequently recommended study technique on the comprehension of expository text by high-school students having learning disabilities. The instructional procedure studied was "Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review" (SQ3R). Six experiments were conducted over a 3-year period,…

An attempt was made to determine whether student honesty is affected by a take-home test, referred to as an unstructured evaluation. A group of 27 students in a history class at a university was given a teacher-made take-home test as a mid-term examination. A second group of 27 students was given the same examination in class. Unknown to the…