This pamphlet, part of a series designed to help parents care for themselves and their children while promoting good mental health, deals with ways in which children are affected by divorce and how they learn to cope with the subsequent separation and changes. Advice for preparing children for the separation and divorce includes suggestions on how…

The results of a survey, comments on the results, and an annotated bibliography are presented in this preliminary study of the impact of federal programs, mandates, and regulations on school principals. The survey involved interviewing 20 principals in urban, suburban, and small-town elementary and secondary schools in the Chicago area about…

A study was conducted to assess the skill of students in identifying meanings of facial expressions in photographs used in the Facial Meaning Sensitivity Test (FMST). Subjects were 55 speech pathology students, 39 nursing students, and 36 speech communication students. The first part of the three part test asked subjects to match 10 photographs…

Six studies which were conducted to determine the effects of testwiseness training on middle school and undergraduate college students' test scores are described. Testwiseness was defined as the cognitive ability or set of skills which a test taker can use to improve his or her score. Testwiseness training presented methods for using deductive…

This report describes the formative evaluation of the first three rough-cut instructional television programs for "On the Level," a series of 12 lessons dealing with personal and social growth for secondary school students. Results discussed are based on viewing three programs in a total of 36 classrooms at sites in Maryland, Tennessee,…

This study investigates the relationship between an examinee's test anxiety level, degree of person fit, and ability. Three major types of person fit indices measure the degree of unusual response patterns: norm comparison indices; goodness-of-fit indices; and extended indices. Five different person fit indices were calculated for the results of…

To determine if an interviewer's orientation toward satisfaction and commitment actually produced different interviewee reactions in these two areas, 20 interviewers conducted an informative and persuasive interview with two different sets of five interviewees (physical education majors). The Conversation Self-Report Inventory (CSRI) was used to…

We are often reminded that we remember little of what we hear and read but much of what we teach. The very act of teaching forces us to clarify our understanding and to process it so that it can be communicated in a structured, clear and accessible way. Here, Heather Scott describes how she got an initially reluctant Year 12 group at Challenge…

Helping students to understand how and why people in the present interpret the past differently is a challenge. It is also vital if we are to develop an understanding of why the meanings we ascribe to the past are not fixed, but rather are subject to our own prejudices or goals. A number of articles in previous editions have explored how students…

This paper outlines and analyzes the important methodological and experimental design considerations uncovered by recent inquiries into the effects of alcohol on human behavior. The major issues discussed include: (1) the need and technique for complete manipulation of subjects' beverage expectancies in conjunction with alcohol and placebo…

This paper concentrates on incidents of severe conflict in eighth-grade classrooms observed in studies of four socially diverse junior high schools in two districts. Severe conflict is generated when teachers violate students' conceptions of the character of legitimate classroom authority. In a cosmopolitan community within an urban complex,…

A set of prevalent emotions, including pity, anger, guilt, pride (self-esteem), gratitude, and resignation, shares a common characteristic, i.e., causal attributions appear to be sufficient antecedents for their elicitation. Research in the field of emotions has shown that the underlying properties or dimensions of attributions are the significant…

Although the recognition of the affective experiences of peers is an important prerequisite for social adaptation, children's ability to recognize peers' facial displays of emotion remains unexamined. To investigate the degree to which young children were able to enact expressions of emotion that were recognizable by peers and adults, and to…

Several studies have indicated that children frequently and actively attempt to manipulate adult behavior. Yet children have not been routinely used as behavioral change agents in the classroom. To study the extent to which teachers' evaluations of students' behavior and academic progress could be changed, 67 male high school students participated…

The single most important thing that a teacher can do for a student is to identify and label specifically what the child does right rather than what he or she does wrong. In an elementary school where students wrote every day and teachers marked every error, students began to write less, using simpler words and eliminating all meaningful writing.…