Historical antecedents are reviewed to show that performance of the trainable mentally retarded (TMR) child cannot be improved by traditional academic methods and that the TMR person can never assume a self directed role in society. (MC)

Compares the ways in which clients seeking counseling perceived high school counselors, college counselors, advisers, counseling psychologists, clinical psychologists, and psychiatrists. Wide differences emerged, even within the three counseling fields, regarding the types of problems students would discuss with members of the groups. (Author)

Looks at relationship between recovery (symptom reduction) from serious psychiatric disorder and patient-held and therapist-held expectations for recovery. Objective measures of prognostic expectations were taken from patients upon hospital admission and from therapists shortly thereafter. Found that therapists', but not patients', expectations…

The main experience of an ideal reader while reading a text is an "envisionment" of that text, a representation in the reader's mind of the content of the text. According to this view the envisionment grows and sometimes changes as the reader progresses through the text, and the ideal reader not only updates and supplements the…

The study investigated the development of 48 gifted adolescents' competencies and achievement related cognitions in mathematical skill development and examined the effects of school achievement level and sex. Ss completed a self instructional packet on mathematical residues (remainders) and were periodically assessed on perceived ability, task…

Recent work in attribution theory has shown the importance of not only the distinction between beliefs in internal and external causes, but also between relatively fixed, stable causes and those more unstable and subject to change. The relationships of causal attributions for success and failure in achievement and social affiliation with…

Experimental studies indicate that the primary determinant of changes in sexual and aggressive behavior following alcohol consumption is expectancy. Multiple regression analyses were performed on the responses of 100 college students to an alcohol-expectancy questionnaire to determine how expectations for sexual and aggressive behavior following…

The National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) members' expectations of teacher and student attitudes toward standardized testing are compared with the actual attitudes of these groups to ascertain whether the perceptions of test specialists are similar to those of test users. Of a random sample of NCME members, assigned systematically to…

Self-efficacy theory maintains that self-efficacy expectancy, a belief about one's ability to perform a behavior successfully, is independent of outcome expectancy, a belief about the likelihood of the behavior leading to a specific outcome. To examine this hypothesis, subjects (N=95) read communications that differed in descriptions of the…

Previous research indicates that social beliefs can act in a self-fulfilling manner, affecting responses to individuals and thereby constraining these individuals to behave in ways that spuriously confirm attitudes about them. The possible role of self-perception, i.e., whether targets of such self-fulfilling prophecies not only alter their…

Two issues related to expectation and student achievement were examined in this study of eighth-grade mathematics students: (1) the influence of parental, peer, and self-expectation on student performance; and (2) the influence of cultural expectations, or stereotypes, on student performance. Students were questioned at the beginning of the school…

Two experiments were conducted to examine self-fulfilling expectancy influence in a simulated supervisor-worker interaction. The first experiment led supervisor subjects to expect either high or low compliance from their workers. All workers completed a set of five tasks twice, once when instructed to work fast and once when instructed to work…

Extending the work of Crandall (1969), this study tested the hypotheses of sex differences in interpretation of past academic performance and expectations of future achievement. Subjects were 225 freshman women and 194 freshman men (93 percent of the freshmen class) at a highly selective midwestern liberal arts college: they did not differ in past…

Discussed is the development of games which provide teacher-trainees with experience in anticipating the responses of different types of handicapped children to different tasks. It is explained that the games are inexpensive, that they permit the trainee to become a participatory observer in an interactional setting, and that they provide…

This study was designed to identify the goal approach behaviors which distinguish first-graders with a successful achievement orientation from equally competent first-graders with an unsuccessful orientation. Based on scores of test anxiety and expectancy for success, 100 boys were designated either success-oriented or failure-threatened and then…