Joseph C. Johnson

Some Attitudinal and Comprehension Factors Operating in the Middle Grades

MANY individuals feel that attitudes may be used to advantage in increasing educational achievement. This has resulted in overlysimplified solutions to educational problems. Today many textbooks and materials are being written which do nothing but portray positive attitudes toward racial and socioeconomic groups in an attempt to solve the educational problems of these groups. This study questions this belief and its application to reading comprehension. The purpose of this study was to examine the reader in grades four through six with regard to the manner in which his attitude toward certain thematic content is related to his comprehension of reading selections. Specifically, the procedures for this study were such as to compare the literal and interpretative comprehension of intermediate grade children on certain thematically based reading selections with their attitudes toward that material. Attitude was de.fined as a relatively stable tendency to respond in a favorable or unfavorable fashion to specific reading themes. As such the construct includes a &dquo;set&dquo; and emotional factors. Reading themes were defined as specific motifs that so often recur in the stories utilized to characterize them. The first theme, labeled the anthropomorphic, was found in success stories of ani-

Book Reviews : Roger Farr. Reading: What Can Be Measured. Newark, Delaware: International Reading Association Research Fund, 1969. Pp. vii + 299.

to ask for fuller and more balanced treatment if not to ask for equal time to reply. To illustrate, the articles on Child Development and Early Childhood Education make no mention of Bloom’s Stability and Change in Human Characteristics although thinking and research planning in both areas had been substantially affected by this 1964 publication even before the Encyclopedia articles were written. Other examples could be cited and are implicitly noted in comments on articles earlier in this review. What this reviewer hopes will be considered a constructive suggestion is to have recourse to the practice that has proved so generally effective in the preparation of the Mental Measurements Yearbooks. That is, have not one long review, but three shorter reviews, preferably by persons with different backgrounds, e.g., a research specialist, a public school or college person-teacher, administrator, counselor-with the most relevant experience, and a third person with tangential interests. In some instances where competing philosophies govern inclusion of topics and references, two or more competing reviewers might be invited to square off and &dquo;have at it.&dquo; To return to the theme at the start of this review, readers will find this Encyclopedia a rich source of reference materials. Unfortunately, many will be outdated rapidly by events and the

5.95

within an historical perspective. Basic problems of personnel selection, allocation, classification, and advisement are discussed. The closing portion of the text is made up of two appendices. The first appendix furnished illustrative data including centour ellipses of the discriminant solution for a sample of nearly 4700 airmen; the second includes test-score data for three occupational groups which may be used for problem-solving activities of the reader. The last three pages of the text contain a bibliography of 42 references pertinent to the classification problem. The authors have, for the most part, furnished convincing evidence of the utility of the discriminant analysis approach. They have almost intentionally overlooked the important work of Cronbach and Gleser regarding decision theory in personnel classification, although Chapter 10 may afford a partial answer to some of the concerns that have been developed by these two writers. For the optimal assignment of personnel the problem of restriction imposed by quotas of personnel to be placed in different job categories has not been satisfactorily treated. Perhaps one of the most dissatisfying aspects of discriminant analysis that the authors tend to ignore is that the factors or dimensions derived are not easy to interpret; in fact, the first dimension which approximates a general factor usually accounts for most of the variance. Rarely are more than two or three factors practical in the interpretation of the dimensionality of discriminant solutions. What is very much needed is a series of empirical studies in which Horst’s multiple differential regression analyses and the multiple discriminant analyses developed in this book, can be compared with

Book Reviews : Delwyn G. Schubert in consultation with Theodore L. Torgerson. A Dictionary of Terms and Concepts in Reading. (2nd ed.) Springfield, Illinois: Charles C Thomas, 1969. Pp. xv + 376.

more serious inconvenience was that page references within an article were not changed to conform to the numbering system of the text, e.g., a sentence on page 49 urges the reader to proceed to page 33 instead of the intended page 67. In short, the copy editing of this text is not on a par with the scholarly editing. Those readers with an interest in quantitative psychology will find this volume an interesting and thorough guide to work in stimulus sampling. Each article provides a bibliography for a more extensive investigation if supplementary reading is desired. The book is suitable for use as a text in a course in mathematical models of