American Educational Research Journal

This study was designed to investigate the development of young children’s self-responsibility for their school learning as influenced by the Self-Schedule System, a learning-management program. A student interview questionnaire, the Self-Responsibility Interview Schedule (SRIS), was constructed to assess children’s knowledge about what they do in school, and whether they perceive that they, rather than the teacher, are responsible for managing their own learning. The results indicate that the Self-Schedule System significantly affected children’s perception of self-responsibility for their school learning as well as their rate of task completion.

The purpose of this study was to gain a better understanding of how communication relates to teaching effectiveness in an Industrial Education setting. Teaching effectiveness was defined in terms of two criteria: supervisor evaluations of teachers and student evaluations of teachers. Results from the study underscored the importance of communication skills in the teaching/learning process. The most important measures were: teacher dynamism, teacher delivery, time spent with the students, positive reinforcement of the students, and positive attitude toward the students. These measures differentiated “good” from “poor” teaching.

A lexical decision task was administered to adults and children in order to study the separate effects of letter frequency, letter sound, and word familiarity variables. Subjects were asked to decide if a four-letter string was a real or a nonsense word. Latency and error measures were obtained. An analysis of the real words indicated that adults and children are alike in being affected by (a) word familiarity, and (b) an interaction between initial consonant frequency and word familiarity. Children were also affected by (c) final consonant frequency, and (d) an interaction between vowel regularity and word familiarity. The results indicated that skilled readers can recognize four-letter words without extensive orthographic analysis. Unskilled readers may use the same process but revert to a phonological encoding when a word is both unfamiliar and contains an irregular vowel.

This experimental study was designed to determine whether the levels of guessing, risk-taking, or achievement could vary under norm referenced or criterion referenced testing conditions. Subjects were 156 students in an introductory measurement course, systematically assigned to a norm referenced or criterion referenced testing condition. Scores on guessing, risk-taking, achievement under penalty, and achievement without penalty-for-guessing were obtained using a multiple choice procedure suggested by Slakter (1967). Results of multivariate and univariate analysis of variance indicated that students tested under the norm referenced condition earned higher achievement scores than those tested under criterion referenced conditions. A significant relationship was observed between risk-taking and achievement only under the criterion referenced condition.

Family constellation variables such as family size, birth order, spacing of children, and crowding were related to academic achievement when IQ was controlled. The sample consisted of 306 girls and 247 boys from large and small families living in four suburban Boston communities. It was found after controlling for IQ that small family boys tended to have better grades than did large family boys. First born girls had higher academic achievement than did latter born girls. Thus a sex-specific pattern of relationships between family constellation and academic achievement appeared. It was suggested that first born girls were more likely to develop patterns of responsibility and hard work which helped them academically. Boys in small families were possibly more oriented toward adult values while large family buys may have been more influenced by peer group, anti-academic values. Crowding was negatively related to achievement for both sexes but its effect became non-significant when IQ was controlled. Sibling spacing was significantly related to achievement only for boys and also lost significance when IQ was controlled.