The investigation reported is primarily a description of how college students solve or fail to solve algebra equations. Protocols were collected from two groups of college students; one group was expected to be good solvers, the other group contained many poor solvers. The investigators sought to identify and classify the difficulties students…

The quality of effort among public assistance personnel has been criticized virtually since the inception of welfare programs for the poor. However, until recently, empirical information on the performance of these workers has been nonexistent. The present study, concerned with Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) case decision errors,…

The concepts of cognitive development and objectivity are explored preparatory to a discussion of a suitable theory of development to be used as the foundation for developmentally-based standardized tests. It is hypothesized that Piagetian theory is the most appropriate basis for such tests and two possible approaches for constructing…

Preliminary results from a longitudinal study of English-speaking children and adults learning Dutch in natural situations suggest that 12- to 15-year-olds learned faster than either older or younger subjects during their first 6 months in Holland. All age differences had disappeared in a group of advanced subjects (English-speakers who had been…

In most behavioral science research very little attention is ever given to the probability of committing a Type II error, i.e., the probability of failing to reject a false null hypothesis. Recent publications by Cohen have led to insight on this topic for the fixed-effects analysis of variance and covariance. This paper provides social scientists…

The purpose of this investigation was to identify patterns of spelling errors among first grade children by classifying these errors in terms of their orthographic structure. The children were equally divided into low, middle, and high ability groups according to the number of words in their individual word banks as produced in their written…

The correction for attenuation formulas for partial, multiple, and canonical correlation coefficients are discussed and the effects of measurement errors on these statistics are explored. The notation is standardized and the derivation extended where appropriate. It is shown that as the reliabilities of the predictors become more disparate, the…

The purpose of this study was to modify the conceptual tempo (response style on a reflective-impulsive dimension) by training impulsive children to increase their response latency or by teaching more effective search strategies and scanning techniques. Subjects were 169 second graders from two lower class area schools. Each subject was assigned to…

Research on error patterns associated with whole number computation is reviewed. Details of the results of some of the individual studies cited are given in the appendices. In Appendix A, 33 addition errors, 27 subtraction errors, 41 multiplication errors, and 41 division errors are identified, and the frequency of these errors made by 352…

This is a slightly abbreviated version of part of a report commissioned at the end of 1995 by the Queensland Department of Education, Peninsula Region, and carried out with the help of teachers at Thursday Island State High School. It analyses some formal language differences between written Standard Australian English and spoken Torres Strait…

The interlanguage hypothesis, as it accounts for some of the problems and complexities inherent in second language learning, is described. This approach is compared with the strong version of the contrastive analysis hypothesis. Strengths and weaknesses of the interlanguage hypothesis are examined. (Author/RM)

Thirty-five secondary school children were interviewed on a one-to-one basis using questions which involved concepts considered as basic to the notion of ratio. One implication of the study is that a doubling ability is no indication of the ability to tackle other ratio questions. (MN)

Tests can identify the strengths and weaknesses of the child, not only in terms of right and wrong answers, but also in terms of how and why the child succeeds or fails to meet significant mathematical standards. (JD)

The work reported in this paper was designed to explore the strategies used by 5-year-olds reading sentences from the first book in their school reading scheme, and to test predictions of error patterns derived from the work of MacKinnon (1959) and Soderbergh (1971). (Author)

Evaluation of the Russian oral and written proficiency of third-year university students (N=9) suggested a clear relationship between the students' initial oral proficiency ratings and the grammatical accuracy of their written compositions; the lower a student's oral proficiency rating, the greater the average number of written mistakes, and vice…