The relationship between perceived freedom and the attribution of attitudes was investigated. Observers were asked to infer an attitude from an actor's behavior when the actor's behavioral freedom was ambiguous. Attributions of attitude corresponded less to the behavior when it was unexpected and when the actor's potential lack of freedom was made…

A model has been developed for studying the relation between text structure and reading comprehension, emphasizing the reader's use of world knowledge and text-structural knowledge to evaluate and interpret meaning from text. When the highlights of the model are considered from the perspective of various expository texts used in research on…

This book presents a critical and integrative review of extant literature on child abuse, and the methodology and results of a study investigating relationships among types of abusing parents (disciplinarian parents and inadequate parents), parental attitudes about childrearing and perceptions of their children, and severity of child abuse.…

Affective development was investigated in 81 learning disabled (LD) and 81 normal achieving (control) children in grades 3-6. The Students' Perception of Ability Scale and the Projected Academic Performance Scale were used to assess academic self-concept and future achievement expectations. Academic locus of control was tapped by the Intellectual…

This study investigated pregnant teenagers' knowledge about infant development during the period of their pregnancy. The sample consisted of 98 teenagers between 14 and 19 years old who were pregnant with their first child; all were planning to keep their babies. The group was approximately 50% black and 50% white, 50% middle class and 50% working…

A group of 253 male students in a freshman chemistry class participated in this research, which investigated the relationship between performance attributions and expectations and performance on a subsequent task. College students attributed their success or failure on two chemistry tests to ability, effort, luck, or task difficulty, and indicated…

In a variable distance 10-trial ringtoss, it was found that success required that a subject exceed his expected score. Therefore, the probability of success was the probability of exceeding the expected score on the 10 throws (Ps10); and this is shown to be different from the probability of scoring a ringer in a single throw (Ps1) from the same…

This experiment shows that most children's expectations for their own performance, measured by their rate of volunteering, can be increased. The experiment is closely modeled after laboratory experiments with adults in formal expectation theory. White middle class suburban children of grades 1, 2, 3 and 4 participated in a story-telling task. In…

This study is a partial replication of Rosenthal's (1968) study of teacher expectation in which students falsely identified to teachers as being capable of doing better work showed greater intellectual growth than control students. The present study sought to determine whether or not this result could be duplicated and whether or not…

A previous version of expectation theory assumed that the likelihood that evaluations will be accepted and used to assign performance expectations for group members depends upon the perceived ability level of the evaluator. An extension of the theory asserts that, in the absence of knowledge of the evaluator's ability, acceptance of his…

The booklet, designed as a practical guide, deals with the preparation of instructional objectives for teaching and testing. Emphasized are the statement of instructional objectives as learning outcomes and the definition of the objectives in terms of specific types of behavior (knowledge or skills) expected of students at the end of the learning…

This study examined the extent of children's awareness of the semantic subtleties of the word "promise" and their comprehension of sentences following an atypical syntactic pattern using "promise" as the main verb. Subjects included children within three months of being six-and-one-half, eight-and-one-half, nine-and-one-half, and ten-and-one-half…

The results of several research studies designed to evaluate different theories of work motivation are presented. Graen (1967), through hiring 169 high school girls to do a clerical task, showed that ability measures can account for far more performance variance than motivation variables such as expectancy and instrumentality. Similar results were…

A review of the literature indicates that measures of the McClelland-Atkinson need-Achievement (nAch) construct are weak in terms of both reliability and validity. The most serious weakness of the model's validity is the lack of evidence for the hypothesized positive relationship between nAch and performance. In addition, the inverse relationship…

This report deals with the effects of an individual's expectations regarding how he will be tested on what he does during learning and what gets stored in memory. It is maintained that essay exams requiring recall are preferable to objective (recognition) tests. There are some bits of empirical evidence as well as some theoretical reasons to…