Entry level and senior students given identical pharmacy law units were compared and effects of prior internship and externship experience assessed. Seniors' achievement gain was greater, but prior practical experience showed little effect on achievement. Retention was statistically significant for sophomores 9 to 12 months post-instruction, and…

Test data were used to compare the grading of two forms of double mathematics: pure and applied math, and regular and advanced math. Results confirm expectations that in the former system, the grading is comparable, and in the latter, it is not necessarily comparable. Implications for student admission are discussed. (MSE)

Explores the generalization of changes in children's preferences for easy or difficult goals, when their preferences are induced by exposure to peer models playing a novel athletic game. Subjects played the same game immediately after exposure, participated in a "spelling bee" three weeks later, and chose puzzles of differing levels of…

The restrictions on item difficulties that must be met when binomial models are applied to domain-referenced testing are examined. Both a deterministic and a stochastic conception of item responses are discussed with respect to difficulty and Guttman-type items. (Author/BH)

Two studies were conducted to determine whether students perceive meaningful influence patterns among the causal variables involved in determining exam performance. It was observed that the students perceived a number of both unidirectional and bidirectional intercausal effects; these were related to both perceived success and causal attributions.…

Instructional variables were manipulated to determine whether they influence the level of perceptual analysis. The relationships of perceptual analysis to concept learning and evaluations of the instructors were also examined in the study. (Author/GK)

Multiple-choice tests composed entirely of two-, three-, or four-choice items were investigated. Results indicated that number of alternatives per item was inversely related to item difficulty, but directly related to item discrimination. Reliability and standard error of measurement of three-choice item tests was equivalent or superior.…

Subjects were presented with tasks varying in the extent to which success was diagnostic of high ability and failure was diagnostic of low ability. Results supported the self-assessment theory--high achievement-motivated subjects were more interested in obtaining diagnostic information than in succeeding at difficult tasks. (Author/GDC)

Compares the use of sentence weight and the T-unit in measuring the oral language of 32 adolescents. Indicates the relative merits of the T-unit as a measure of oral language, because the two measures appeared to give much the same information about the speech samples examined. (RL)

The notion that a prerequisite for asking questions about new topic matter is some appropriate level of knowledge was tested. Learners with two levels of background knowledge using learning material with two levels of difficulty were studied. (SW)

This study focuses on the ideas that are articulated within architectural firms and how these ideas affect basic dimensions of organization: task and structural complexity and successful innovation, as measured by the firm's success in winning design awards. (Author)

The results of this study show a significant inverse relationship between subjects' written syntactic complexity and cloze test scores across the three grade levels tested (eight, twelve, and thirteen). (DD)

Examination of the effects of difficulty level of academic tasks on the behavior of 2 subjects (ages 9 and 12) with severe behavior disorders found that difficult tasks were generally associated with lower percentages of time-on-task and higher percentages of time engaged in disruptive behavior than were easy task conditions. (Author/DB)

Examined relations between algebraic word-problem attributes and students' strategies, errors, and problem difficulty. Found that constructed responses capture strategy formulation and high-level planning--as do traditional measures of quantitative reasoning--but are more sensitive to individual problem characteristics and procedural errors that…

Analyzes how 20 groups of management specialists in charge of a computer-simulated company behaved when confronted with complex problems that arose. Difficulties stemmed from an incorrect use of available knowledge, a tendency to avoid risks and reduce uncertainty, and a motivational process which sheltered the subjective sense of competence. (AEF)