To gain a perspective on the kinds of people who find newspapers and television to be high or low in credibility, a two-phase study combined demographic and other characteristics, media behavior, and attitudes toward the media. The first phase involved a series of focused group discussions, while the second was a national, representative sampling…

A study investigated the readability of current laws for Canadian francophones and anglophones. The 63 subjects were asked to read a variety of brief legal texts available in parallel styles in both languages and to answer questions about the texts' content. Subjects were also surveyed about their preference for a formal or vulgarized style of…

The impact of interest on specific quantitative and qualitative measures was studied by examining the relationship between interest in research methodology by education students and knowledge in the area. The "Study Interest Questionnaire" (Winteler and Sierwald, 1987) and a questionnaire on interest in empirical research methodology were…

The recent interest in reflective teaching has resulted in a number of studies in which reflective teaching is proposed as an important aim to be achieved through teacher education programs. Programs for the development of reflective teaching have been proposed, however, attempts at clarifying the meaning of reflective teaching have been scarce.…

Cumulative school records kept on children generally contain only standardized test scores and random notes concerning conduct, yet some theorists suggest that one of the most powerful tools of assessment is teachers' daily observation. To determine teachers' capability for evaluating their students' reading, a study examined teachers' informal…

The Teacher Education and Learning to Teach Study of the National Center for Research on Teacher Education combines case studies of teacher education programs with longitudinal studies of teacher learning. In this paper, the development of the theoretical framework on which instrumentation for the longitudinal study is based is discussed.…

A secondary analysis of data collected by Thomas Patterson during the 1976 presidential campaign was made to test three hypotheses: (1) respondents in a media-rich environment will show higher levels of political information holding than respondents in a media-poor environment, (2) differences in information holding levels between a media-rich…

As data on the reliability and validity of ratings of infant temperament have accumulated, researchers have begun to ask what caregiver ratings really measure. An argument has been made that ratings of social behavior are less a reflection of enduring individual differences than a measure of rater characteristics and error variance. This study…

The development of children's understanding of the learning process and factors that affect learning was explored with a sample of 18 children from 6 to 13 years of age. Subjects were interviewed, and three levels of their reasoning were identified. The 6- to 7-year-old subjects viewed learning as "doing" and reasoned that…

Two experiments were performed on two different populations of preschool children with a mean age of 4.5 years. One group was enrolled in a half-day nursery school program and the other attended a full-day program. A microcomputer and age-appropriate software were placed in each classroom according to the following schedule of treatment weeks:…

The Nutrition and Gerontology Services Project attempted to affect basal nutrition knowledge and address dietary changes for 478 California senior citizens who were live-in residents in homes for the aged. Two instruments were employed to measure study variables. Knowledge of nutrition was measured by the Nutritional Learning Scale, an orally…

This paper discusses perspectives on the relationship between parents and professionals in the diagnosis and treatment of children with autism. In the first section, the mother of an autistic adult recounts her early experiences in trying to obtain needed services and support for her then young child. A professional then describes the negative and…

The abstract and complex nature of decision-making processes and structure in colleges and universities is discussed from the perspective of organizational behavior theory developed in the industrial sector. After an introductory discussion of the history of organizational problems in higher education, the two main sections of the book are…

The empirical study of knowledge representation is the focus of this paper, which observes that language as the cognitive instrument in the communication of phenomena must be capable of expressing relations of the observer-observation kind. The paper points out that this implies a coopeartive process at work in the production of a text, of which…

Perspectives regarding the "information-oriented" approach of conservative, traditional philosophy and an approach to philosophy known as "conceptual therapy" are offered. The former emphasizes scholarship, textual explication and criticism, and, in general, a knowledge of the views of traditional thinkers. Philosophy as conceptual therapy seeks…