In order to determine how much objective evidence exists regarding the effectiveness of career education programs in U.S. schools, American Institutes for Research in Behavioral Sciences (AIR) conducted a comprehensive, national search for well-evaluated activities. The initial nominations of 394 programs were received from state career education…

Two experiments were conducted to determine: (1) whether fear of success, as measured by three different instruments, interacts with subjects' expectancies of success to affect performance on exams in college courses; (2) whether fear of success can be clearly distinguished from fear of failure; and (3) whether males and females differ on fear of…

This article examines nine dimensions to the meaning of school desegregation for black children and analyzes one attitudinal outcome related to each dimension. The dimensions (listed first) and corresponding outcomes are as follows: (1) symbolic message and sense of control; (2) borrowed stigma aura and self esteem; (3) relative deprivation and…

Field independence, empathy, perceived social distance, and self-esteem are being examined in this on-going investigation of the characteristics of a good language learner. The results of various measures of these four variables are being correlated with language proficiency tests and teacher and self-evaluations. It is suggested that conflicting…

Selection of workers for counseling programs is a process which occurs everywhere, but little research has been done on this issue. Traditional methods of selection--self-selection, interviews and/or recommendations and psychological testing--have fallen short on issues of reliability and validity. A behavioral measure which placed…

Based on the premise that teachers usually blame the education system and the administration for discrepancies between how and what they want to teach, and how and what they actually do teach, a study was conducted to determine if teachers really are constrained by their administrators. Ninety-three teachers of tenth-year English from 22…

Previous research has shown that individuals take more responsibility for group outcomes than other participants attribute to them. To assess whether the interactive component of the group endeavor is the locus of this self-centered bias, group members (N=80) worked on analogies either separately in coaction groups or together in interaction…

This study of women college graduates in the United States and Great Britain analyzes the effect of social origins and familial factors on educational attainment. The sample consisted of 1,435 American and 1,805 British females who graduated in 1961 and 1960 respectively. Longitudinal data were drawn from the National Opinion Research Center and a…

Goal-setting has been accepted as an effective motivational tool. Whether goals should be participatively set or assigned was examined by holding goal difficulty constant in an investigation based on previous results which suggested that participants in goal-setting set more difficult goals than those for whom goals are assigned. Results suggest…

Technical Communication Competence (TCC)is the competence involved in communicating mental images to others in such a manner as to result in their constructing comparable mental images, a process similar to the primary task demanded of teachers at all levels. In a study designed to discover the extent to which a positive relationship existed…

The Vocational Instruction, Training and Assessment (VITA) Project conducted a study to determine whether a battery of tests used with a sample of handicapped students enrolled in vocational education program(s) could aid in predicting success in vocational training. Procedures, instruments, and student samples were selected to provide data on (1)…

The possible influence of cognitive dissonance in psychotherapy was examined by conceptualizing therapy as an effort justification process. It was predicted that freely choosing to undergo a highly effortful procedure would aid in positive therapeutic change. Subjects (N=52) participated in a weight-reduction experiment in which the degree of…

The purpose of this report is to identify the school setting variables and the teacher competencies which contribute to achievement in the basic skills in mathematics. The search for indicators of competence was accomplished by literature review, expert opinion, research data, and identified student outcomes. The objective was to identify those…

This paper presents the results of a five year effort to evaluate the results of tests and questionnaires administered to Follow Through (FT) and non-Follow Through (NFT) children and their parents and teachers. The test battery studied included the Metropolitan Achievement Test (MAT), the Raven's Progressive Matrices instrument, the Cooperville…

The positive and negative effects of a woman's return to shcool on herself and her family was the object of a study conducted in 1975. Two detailed questionnaires were completed by 361 women attending three Detroit area universities. Of the 361 respondents, 33 of them had not remained in school for more than three consecutive semesters since their…