This paper examines education for cultural awareness in a Japanese school abroad from the perspective of the teachers. An attempt is made to identify the difficulties which might be encountered by teachers when teaching about the host society and its culture. The paper also examines how this particular school modified its existing approach to…

The present study examines the role of orthographic complexity on Italian children's word reading. Two experiments are reported in which elementary school children (3rd and 5th graders) read aloud words containing simple or contextual letter-sound conversion rules. In Experiment 1, both groups of participants read words containing contextual rules…

Demand is placed on students in a variety of ways and, in some cases, affects whether or not a student engages in problem behavior. The authors' purpose in this study was to investigate the variables that influence demand and examine how changes in those variables affected a child's behavior. The authors used parametric design in which the…

Randomly equivalent forms (REF) of tests in listening and reading for nonnative speakers of English were created by stratified random assignment of items to forms, stratifying on item content and predicted difficulty. The study included 50 replications of the procedure for each test. Each replication generated 2 REFs. The equivalence of those 2…

Research in the field of attribution theory and academic achievement suggests a relationship between a student's attributional style and achievement. Theorists and researchers contend that attributions influence individual reactions to success and failure. They also report that individuals use attributions to explain and justify their performance.…

A study was conducted to categorize the questions found in the reading skills development books used in Maryland's community colleges according to Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. The study sought to determine the number of questions per taxonomy category; whether there was a significant difference between observed and expected…

This study used meaningful pictorial material to compare the functions relating complexity to two different response variables (voluntary looking time and preference) in 192 students from grades 1 to 8. Age differences were slight, and results are discussed in terms of theories postulating increases with experience in preference for complexity.…

The relationships between mothers' and children's speech were analyzed with regard to complexity and usage of selected speech types. The findings suggest that the responsiveness of child speech to mothers' speech seems to influence the mothers' language complexity, allowing the child to exert an influence on his language environment. (JMB)

This paper focuses on the mechanics and dynamics of questioning techniques as aids to trainers/teachers in "getting across" subject matter and interacting effectively with learners. The mechanics include three levels of questions--knowledge, application and problem-solving. Each of these levels is designed to foster different and…

Determining the extent of consistency between distinct concepts has become increasingly important in current theorizing about the development and organization of cognitive structure. This paper discusses several conceptual and measurement issues that must be addressed in analyses of interconcept consistency: the distinction between connectivity…

A model of test item dependency is presented and used to illustrate the effect that violations of local independence have on the behavior of item characteristic curves. The dependency model is flexible enough to simulate the interaction of a number of factors including item difficulty and item discrimination, varying degrees of item dependence,…

Previous research has concluded that no reliable individual differences have been demonstrated in goal-setting studies, probably because the goals were assigned rather than set by the individuals. This study examined individual's self-set goals, certainty, and task performance of two work periods in a group setting as a function of Type A behavior…

This paper is the transcript of a talk given to those who use test information but who have little technical background in test theory. The concepts of modern test theory are compared with traditional test theory, as well as a probable future test theory. The explanations given are couched within an extended metaphor that allows a full description…

A new indicator of item difficulty, which identifies effectiveness ranges, overcomes the limitations of other item difficulty indexes in describing the difficulty of an item or a test as a whole and in aiding the selection of appropriate ability level items for a test. There are three common uses of the term "item difficulty": (1) the probability…

Educators generally assume that questioning promotes learning and that higher level questions do so better than lower level questions. But there are a number of problems with these assumptions. First, the classification of questions as higher level or lower level is ambiguous. The distinction is confused by such issues as non-controversial…