This preliminary report sets the Folktale project, an interdisciplinary cooperative effort involving literary criticism, linguistics, the craft of translation, psychology, and statistics, in the context of reading and reading research in the modern world, and discusses experimental reader response research in Denmark as well as in other countries.…

This report, the second of seven, part of an interdisciplinary project on the context of reading and reading research that explores similarities and dissimilarities in the response to literature in readers from different cultures, describes the way in which potentially useful texts, i.e. folktales, were selected by team members. The report first…

Reader-writer conferencing was examined as an alternative or complement to the direct assessment of writing. Criteria guiding development of a framework for analysis of reader-writer conferencing were summarized as: (1) achievability; (2) transfer to other domains of writing; (3) importance of the outcomes; (4) inter-scorer agreement; and (5)…

Students who are motivated to write and learn generally pay attention to written comments on their rough and final drafts; students who are not motivated generally ignore written comments and do not use them in revision, but nonetheless are concerned about grades. One effective way of increasing student interest in writing and skill development is…

A study investigated the role that writing plays in eleventh grade students' understanding of literary texts. Classroom observations, collected student writing, interviews with the teacher, and interviews with six case study students--two from each of three classes--provided a portrait of teaching methods, writing tasks, and student responses to…

To gauge students' reactions to a teacher's written comments on final drafts of their papers, a questionnaire was administered to 197 students in six sections of freshman composition. Most of the students responding to the questionnaire were majoring in engineering, computer science, or business. Their six instructors had similar criteria for…

Earlier versions of the four papers presented in this collection formed a symposium, "Children's Interactions with Television," at the 1982 International Congress of Applied Psychology in Edinburgh. In the first paper, "Children's Comprehension of Television Programs," Peter Rendell and Mary Nixon describe a study which…

The purpose of this book is to provide teachers of literature with a sampling of a wide range of theoretical backgrounds and possible pedagogical applications for reading, writing, and interpreting literature in school classrooms, elementary through college. The book contains the following essays listed with their authors: (1) "Henny Penny to…

This paper highlights the findings of Gougeon's 1989 study of high school principals of schools with grade configurations 9 through 12 in the state of Washington, a study based on the Principal Leadership as Social Control (PLASC) theory. Accordingly, the first section describes the PLASC theory as social control of teachers through power- and…

This study assumes that multiple choice test items generally provide the testee with several solutions, one of which is correct and the others of which are wrong. If pupils are unable to answer a question, one would expect that the wrong choices have equal chances of being selected. In many multiple choice items on stoichiometric calculation which…

The comparative effects of various sequences of test items were examined for over 900 graduate students enrolled in an educational research course at The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. experiment, which was conducted a total of four times using four separate tests, presented three different arrangements of 50 multiple-choice items: (1)…

Designed as a comprehensive resource guide for educators, health-care professionals, and media librarians, this document contains information on 45 aging-related films which are humanistic in nature, i.e., films which recreate an individual's experience at a specific time and in a particular setting. The text is divided into five chapters, each…

Following a review of empirical research on teacher feedback to students' wrong responses, this paper describes a paradigm for use with direct instruction materials, applying the feedback model to comprehension tasks from traditional reading and science textbooks. The next section details a classification system for wrong responses grouped into…

This project investigated the effects of increasing teachers' wait times on general questioning skills in science teaching. Variables were separated through the use of four treatment groups, each containing ten science teachers. Schools were randomly assigned to four treatment conditions from a subsampling of middle schools in a central New York…

This paper briefly reviews the two assumptions involved in the use of a stress management approach with parents of the developmentally disabled, i.e., that many parents are subject to high stress and that stress interferes with the person's functioning. A discussion of possible stressors and possible effects of stress are outlined, e.g., health…