Pretests and post-tests, which measure the knowledge of students before and after instruction, are used to evaluate the effectiveness of a self-instructional "Library Survival Kit," which teaches basic library skills to freshmen at Richmond College. Findings of this study indicate a significant improvement and a passing average for the freshmen…

This study was designed to determine the effectiveness of textbook and lecture methods of instruction on student achievement during 10 days of an introductory psychology course. The 48 subjects were randomly assigned to four treatment groups. The same examination was given as pretest and as post-test. The test was concerned with recall of factual…

A pretest/post-test procedure for measuring information gain from discourse was investigated together with several other aspects of discourse processing. The main purpose was to determine the effect of a pretest on discourse learning as measured by post-test performance. The study also investigated (1) serial position effects in learning from…

The final evaluation report for the Colorado City Bilingual Education Program is presented in this paper. The project was directed to kindergarten children from low-income disadvantaged homes; of 63 participants, 53 were Spanish-speaking children and 10 were monolingual English-speaking children. Project staff consisted of a bilingual teacher, a…

A preliminary study was conducted at which the "Test for Economic Understanding" was given to 98 Anglo and 35 Mexican American freshmen and sophomore students at New Mexico State University at the beginning and end of the 1971 fall semester. The following questions guided the investigation: (1) Is there a significant difference between…

A statistical method, Fishers Table of t (or t ratio), is used to determine the statistical significance of a comparison of results from pretests and post-tests of knowledge and skill taken by training program participants. A statistically significant improvement can demonstrate training effectiveness. (MS)

Eight, ten, and twelve year old children were tested on a novel procedure involving the successive presentation of standard and comparision stimuli. Two hypotheses were evaluated: one dealing with memory effects, and the other with children's pretesting of choice responses in spatial information processing. (Editor/RK)

Retrospective pretesting is a method for inferring learning by using the students' recollections of their preinstruction knowledge in lieu of actual pretesting. The most significant problem encountered in such a procedure is establishing the validity of the inferred precourse level of information; attempts to deal with that issue are presented.…

Nine components of a system for teaching shorthand transcription are described and examples of how each component was integrated into courses at Los Angeles City College are presented. (BM)

A self-instructional workshop is described in which the effectiveness of a text was determined by pretest and posttest. The results suggest that pretesting and posttesting along with self-instructional materials are feasible alternatives to the usual lecture approach to continuing education. (LBH)

Many large-scale testing programs routinely pretest new items alongside operational (or scored) items to determine their empirical characteristics. If these pretest items pass certain statistical criteria, they are placed into an operational item pool; otherwise they are edited and re-pretested or simply discarded. In these situations, reliable…

An analysis of various studies which have examined the effect of questions in the textual content of instructional materials. (JB)

Described is a study designed to test on a scientific basis the effectiveness of Dr. Francis Christensen's program for teaching composition. (RY)