Percy D. Peckham

School psychologists at three-quarters century: Congruence between training, practice, preferred role and competence.

Abstract A national sample of practicing school psychologists responded to a questionnaire measuring certain demographic characteristics and their perceptions of their training, practice, preferred job, and competence. Characteristics of the sample are reported and congruence measures are given for the major variables. Finally, differences are examined for job setting (urban-rural), degree field (school psychology-other), and degree level (doctoral-subdoctoral). Implications for the profession are discussed.

Gender Differences in Attributions for Success and Failure Situations across Subject Areas.

AbstractTo examine gender differences in attributions for success and failure across subject areas, the Survey of Achievement Responsibility (SOAR), a school-related attribution scale, was administered to a randomly selected sample from a large urban school district in the Northwest. The SOAR assesses attributions for success and failure in language arts and mathematics/science. Gender differences for the 165 girls and 160 boys did emerge. As the literature might suggest, girls had a more learned-helpless orientation in mathematics/science than did boys. In language arts, however, both were somewhat mastery oriented. Overall, both reflected a more adaptive pattern in language arts than in mathematics/science.

The Experimental Unit in Statistical Analysis

healthy skepticism toward their own work, because the validity of any statistical analysis for any experiment depends upon how nearly the data and components of the experiment approximate the conditions of the mathematical model employed. The mathematical statistician is largely concerned with the development of &dquo;theoretical&dquo; experiments; the researcher employs models developed by the theoretician to assist him in making an objective and, hopefully, correct interpretation. Some situations closely parallel the models but other situations are only rough approximations, at best. The &dquo;success&dquo; of gambling casinos in Las Vegas rests on the premise that the assumptions of their mathematical models are almost perfectly met. Conversely, the probability-calculated assuming fair dice-of 15 straight &dquo;passes&dquo; is irrelevant in a crap game with loaded dice. Perfect isomorphism between models and reality is rarely possible in the behavioral sciences, yet the accuracy of our conclusions and inferences is contingent, at least in part, upon the degree of correspondence between the model and the experimental processes and data. A researcher needs

Gender Differences in Attributions for Success and Failure

The study examined gender differences in attributions for success and failure in math/science and language arts. Developmental patterns were also examined through a cross sectional design of 731 boys and 680 girls in grades four through eleven. Girls were found to have fewer adaptive attributional patterns in math/science than in language arts. While boys had more adaptive patterns in math/science than had girls, they also had more adaptive patterns for language arts patterns than for math/science. It was concluded that cross content area research should consider the students relative perceived task difficulty.

Use of objective examinations in medicine clerkships. Ten-year experience

Student performance during the internal medicine clerkship at the University of Washington School of Medicine has been evaluated by clinical ratings and a written examination containing multiple-choice questions and patient management problems for the past 10 years. Measures of the correlation among the evaluation methods were determined by analyzing data from 1,544 students. The correlations of clinical ratings with the total examination score (r = 0.27), multiple-choice questions (r = 0.23), and patient management problems (r = 0.19) suggest that clinical ratings alone are not adequate for measuring student progress. The relationships of evaluation methods used in the medicine clerkship to other measures of performance such as selection to Alpha Omega Alpha and National Board examinations were also determined. The ability to predict student performance was enhanced considerably when the results of the clerkship examination were considered in addition to clinical ratings. These data suggest that a comprehensive assessment of student performance in medicine clerkships should include written examinations in addition to clinical ratings.

Rule learning and complexity in simulated reading

Abstract Three approaches (Rule, Higher-order Unit, Whole Word) to decoding in a simulated reading task were studied. Rule complexity was varied in three experiments employing symbols (

The Development of a Computer Simulation Model for the Investigation of Music Concept Formation

, @, etc.) as stimuli and numbers as responses. CAI was the experimental vehicle. The 110 fifth and sixth grade boys and girls from an inner-city school were randomly assigned to one of the 11 groups in the three experiments. When the rule was simple (one-to-one correspondence) the rule approach was superior, but when the rule was complex (simulation of the final e rule in reading) the higher-order unit approach was superior. Higher-order unit subjects studied examples composed of the fewest stimuli possible to illustrate the rule.

Higher-Order Units in Reading Instruction.

The research reported in this article is concerned with the construction of a digital computer model which simulates the strategies a learner employs in classifying musical events. The report presents the theoretical bases for a model of concept simulation (CONSIM) and generally describes its operational system. Using concepts of melodic shape, two experiments were conducted with this model and the experimental runs served to provide an indication of the programmes efficiency in generating predicted response output.

Book Reviews : Gilbert Sax. Empirical Foundations of Educational Research. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1968. Pp xiii + 443.

Abstract Gibson and her colleagues have presented arguments and evidence suggesting that the most appropriate unit to teach in reading is neither the single letter nor the whole word but a higher-order unit determined from examining grapheme-phoneme correspondences. The present study employed a computer analysis of the most frequently occurring (approximately 18,000) words in the English language. All letter strings from two to seven letters in length (here after called ngrams) were output with all the words in which the ngram appeared printed beneath the ngram. In addition type and token frequencies of each ngram were calculated and printed in separate rank order and alphabetic lists. Preliminary analysis of the consistency of mappings of various ngrams suggests that many are potentially useful for reading instruction. Current research with the computer is designed to extend the preliminary analysis.

7.50

Instructors of introductory and survey courses in research methods have an impressive array of books from which to choose. This book by Sax enlarges that subset which ought to be seriously considered. The author uses the conduct of a research study as his unifying theme and he follows this topic from the selection of a problem for investigation to the preparation of the final report. It is probably true that no book of manageable size which surveys an area of content as broad as educational research can be comprehensive enough to satisfy every interested person. Thus, each text will be judged in terms of the agreement of topics selected for inclusion and those topics thought to be important. A judgment about adequacy in this regard is, therefore, largely a personal one and must be made by each potential user. The orientation of the author is clearly one of empiricism and experimentalism. Problems of descriptive and correlational research are discussed only briefly and this discussion serves the purpose of giving students a nodding acquaintance with their possible areas of application and their limitations. Historical research is omitted, not because the author feels that it is unimportant but because &dquo;... historiography is in itself a highly complex field deserving to be studied on its own by those planning to specialize in the history or philosophy of education.&dquo; The first two chapters provide a setting and a rationale for the utilization of the scientific method in education. They contain a brief but excellent summary of the history of psychometrics and of