A periodical database was searched to investigate the occurrence of favorable and unfavorable book reviews to determine the role of reviews in library selection. Compares book reviews with other types of reviews, examines relationships between review evaluations and other review characteristics, and compares the number of favorable and unfavorable…

Outlines the usefulness of a book club for elementary school teachers and reading supervisors on the topic of the teaching of reading. Discusses choosing topics for discussion, organizing the club, and forming a community of learners. Stresses the importance of reading across the curriculum. Argues that such a reading club can also assist teachers…

Professors have long assigned to their students works of which they were the author. The practice ranges from assigning commercially published textbooks they have written to having students buy a volume they have written and published or course packs made up of their own materials they have photocopied. Not only individual professors, but also…

The first of two articles looks at reasons for library automation vendor failure and techniques that libraries can use to assess and reduce their risk in vendor selection. In the second article, representatives of eight prominent automation firms discuss industry problems. Three references are listed. (MES)

Factors to consider in choosing media: instructional design, logistics, equipment, material, and teacher preferences. (BD)

Decries lack of consistency of diacritical markings across different dictionaries, textbooks, etc; urges textbook committees to keep this factor in mind. (MH)

The author offers a generalized approach to the selection of a medium of instruction which lists the steps involved in media selection with a breakdown of the preliminary information required, the task, and the output of each step." (Author/AK)

The use of these three model selection information criteria for latent class models was studied for nonnested models: (1) Akaike's information criterion (H. Akaike, 1973) (AIC); (2) the Schwarz information (G. Schwarz, 1978) (SIC) criterion; and (3) the Bozdogan version of the AIC (CAIC) (H. Bozdogan, 1987). Situations in which each is preferable…

Presents a generalization and improvement for the definition proposed by E. Dzhafarov (2001) for selectiveness in the dependence of several random variables on several (sets of) external factors. This generalization links the notion of selective influence with that of conditional independence. (SLD)

Discusses issues in structural-equation-model selection that pertain to the general utility of the principle of parsimony. Provides an example using data generated by the relatively nonparsimonious simplex model and fitted rather well by a parsimonious growth-curve model belonging to a different class of models. (Author/SLD)

School districts currently spend $2.6 billion annually on maintaining a system of recruiting and hiring teachers who quit or fail. The 120 major urban districts are the primary locus of this teacher churn. The causes include the negative conditions of work in these districts, the impersonal hiring procedures which recruit and hire the wrong people…