American Educational Research Journal

This study is an evaluation of educational research articles published during 1971. It replicates a study conducted in 1962 by a committee of AERA. As in the earlier study, it was found that most published research is of mediocre quality. Articles published in journals of “related professions” were rated higher than those published in education journals. However, the discrepancy between the classes of journals was not as great as in 1962. The most frequently cited shortcomings of re search articles were in the areas of “procedures,” “data analysis,” and “summary and conclusions.”

Three conceptualizations of creativity, including a mental abilities approach, an ego-analytic levels analysis approach, and an attitudinal self-concept approach, were each translated into sets of self-statements which could be modeled and then rehearsed by a group of volunteer college students. This self-instructional training group (N = 7), relative to Gendlin’s focusing training (N = 7) and to an untreated waiting list control group (N = 7), manifested a significant increase in originality and flexibility on tests of divergent thinking, an increase in preference for complexity, a significant increase in human movement responses to an inkblot test, and concomitant changes in self-concept. As a result of the focusing training, which emphasized being aware of one’s bodily feelings, the subjects' self-reports indicated that they felt more creative, but this was not reflected in their performance. The implications of enhancing creativity by explicitly training subjects to talk to themselves was discussed.

Using a proactive model of transfer of learning, two hypotheses were tested about how specific, experimentally induced differences in prior instruction determine the results of subsequent verbal instruction. In an experiment, 352 children from inner city schools in Los Angeles were individually randomly assigned to six treatments and individually taught and tested. The results supported the two hypotheses about transfer, indicating that transfer depended upon the congruence between the students’ previous learning in the experiment and subsequent instruction.

This study assessed the effects of modeling and classroom organization, open and traditional, on the personal space of third and fourth grade boys and girls. The sample was composed of 80 students selected from the third and fourth grades from an elementary school with open classroom organization, and a like number selected from a traditional elementary school. In addition, one half of the students from each school viewed a video tape in which a teacher and two students interacted in a proximate teaching situation, while the remaining one half of the students viewed the same teacher and students in a distant teaching situation. The results indicated that open classroom students reported smaller interpersonal distances to specific individuals than traditional classroom students. Also, exposure to the proximate modeled teaching session significantly decreased the subject’s personal space, whereas the distant modeled teaching sessions exhibited little influence on the interpersonal distances.

This study tests the hypothesis that types of students tend to differ in the benefit that they receive from various types of teachers. Factor analysis was used to identify four types of students (kindergarten children) and four types of teachers. The findings from the analysis of variance procedure were that a certain type of teacher was significantly more effective with one type of student than with another. The knowledge that different types of teachers tend to differ in the success they have with the same type of student, and that different types of students tend to differ in the benefit they receive from the same type of teacher might provide a basis for the matching of students with teachers.

A conceptual model which relates patterns of academic achievement to the personality characteristics of learners was tested by a quasi-longitudinal study. The results of the study provide strong evidence for a model which emphasizes the influence of histories of successful academic achievement on personality characteristics. The findings suggest, additionally, that rewards for academic achievement provided by the home are related to both high achievement and positive personality characteristics. Instructional models such as Mastery Learning and the manipulation of time variables are discussed in terms of their potential for providing students the means both to achieve well and develop positive personality characteristics.