Cloze procedure involves the skills of thinking, understanding , reading and writing based on the learners underlying knowledge of reading comprehension and writing subskills such as grammar and sentence construction. It is regarded as a very efficient test for measuring students integrative competence in English, and has been used in most of the important English tests in China. It is also used as a teaching instrument to help students to improve their reading competence. However, a majority of students perform poorly in cloze tests and they regard it as the most difficult and most unpopular part of the English test. The aim of this study was to find out the problem that Chinese students have with cloze tests and to determine whether they are associated with the inefficient use of reading strategies.

An attempt was made to investigate the decision processes of subjects in a bivariate decision making task, similar to that facing a medical specialist who is required to classify a patient as belonging to one of a number of possible disease populations on the basis of the patient's scores of two predictor cues. It was felt that such tasks had been largely neglected in experimental psychology, where the tendency has been towards requiring subjects to learn relationships between continuous predictor variables and a continuous criterion, rather than between continuous predictor variables and a categorical criterion. When the relationship between the predictor variables is the same in both the populations to be discriminated, the best decision function is based on a linear combination of the cues (Fisher’s Linear Discriminant Function). It was found that the decisions of those subjects who learned to use the cues in a way which was at all valid in such situations, could be well approximated by a model which weighted the two cues equally in a linear combination and based it’s decisions on the result. When the relationship between the predictor variables differs from one population to the other, however, the best decision function becomes more complex, including terms in the squares and cross-products of the cues. It was felt that such situations are particularly relevant to medical decision making where clinicians have frequently claimed that the "pattern" of scores of a patient is important, not Just the individual scores on each cue. It was found that if differences in cue intercorrelation were large, then subjects seemed to inolude in their iii decision processes, some nonlinear term to take account of this fact. If, however, differences in cue intercorrelation were only moderate, or if the correlations involved were large hut negative, this seemed to go unnoticed by the subjects and did not lead to any reliance on nonlinear terms. The results show that previous findings in "real life" tasks, that decision making processes could be adequately represented as linear combinations of cues, may be due more to the linear nature of the tasks than to any predisposition towards linear processes on the part of human decision makers, and that the statistical properties of "real life" tasks must be more thoroughly investigated before it is assumed that they require nonlinear decision processes.

M.Ed. (Psychology of Education) / Please refer to full text to view abstract

For eighty years psychologists have investigated problems touching upon reading ability. It is the purpose of this study to determine if there is any significant difference in the reading ability of boys and girls in the third grade. If such differences are found to exist, an attempt will be made to explain the cause.

The problem of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of certain predictors of reading success and to determine which combination of these predictors was most reliable in predicting reading success.

The primary purpose was to determine the relative effects of drive level, degree of mental retardation, and nature of reinforcer on effectiveness of operant conditioning of mentally retarded children. Embodied in the general purpose were the following sub-purposes: 1. To determine if mentally retarded subjects of differing induced drive levels (defined as satiated, nondeprived, and deprived) learn a simple discrimination problem at different rates. 2. To determine if the nature of the reinforcer (social versus material) produces different effects on performance of the task. 3. To determine the extent to which retardates of differing levels of intelligence learn the task. 4. To determine the degree of interaction among the three main treatment variables (drive level, degree of retardation, and nature of reinforcer) simultaneously.

The present research was an investigation of the effect of two methods of reporting pupil progress on adjustment and achievement of fourth grade pupils in a suburban elementary school. One method involved the use of an evaluation form reflecting performance in terms of ability, parent-teacher conferences, and work samples. The other method was comprised primarily of competitive grading and marking procedures, utilizing a standard report card to report results.

The purpose of the study was to determine whether students' timbre preferences in the sixth grade remain stable through the tenth grade. The investigation also examined whether gender, band instruction, or musical home environment makes any difference in influencing the stability of students' timbre preferences from grade six through ten. Students' timbre preferences at the beginning of the study were compared to their preferences four years later. The students' timbre preferences were obtained by employing Gordon's Instrument Timbre Preference Test (ITPT). A questionnaire was also utilized at the conclusion of the study to determine which students had musical home environments and which did not. All sixth grade students enrolled in a single school district took the ITPT. Each student's scores were tallied and ranked in order to determine their timbre preferences; four years later they were retested and their scores were ranked again.

The problem of this study was to determine the value of certain selected aptitude test scores for predicting student achievement in Spanish, French, and German at North Texas State University. Particular emphasis was placed on freshmen enrolled in beginning courses.

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of managerial experience on the relationships between assertiveness, trait anxiety, and internality, and on each of these constructs individually. Hypotheses were as follows: a) managers would be more assertive, internal, and less trait anxious than business students; b) males would be more assertive than females when students, not managers; and c) assertiveness and internality would relate positively to each other and negatively to trait anxiety. Subjects consisted of 30 managers and 53 business students. The first and third hypotheses were confirmed, although the assertiveness differences were not significant. Reasons for the observed outcome are discussed as well as implications for these constructs' ability to predict management potential.