An emphasis on multicultural education (MCE) permeated the 1977 revision of the NCATE standards, yet regional teacher education institutions in Missouri and its eight bordering states are predominantly unicultural in demography. Therefore, a Delphi survey in three rounds tested opinions of selected issues related to cultural pluralism, multicultural teacher education, accreditation, and related institution-specific practices. The study determined the perceptions of the program leaders and whether consensus exists on these issues. / Respondents expressed strongest support for ideological issues related to multicultural teacher education, while expressing clear, but less strong, support for accreditation and topics within cultural pluralism. While institution-specific practices showed least agreement overall, respondents indicated that they believe they have implemented multicultural teacher education programs in relatively unicultural settings, at least to NCATE's satisfaction. / Strongest consensus was determined for some 11 of the 47 items, centering on ideological issues concerning MCE within teacher education programs. Least consensus was conveyed on nine items touching on all sections of the survey. Consensus for the remaining items was reserved, qualified either by the comparative strength of dissent expressed for an item whose mean response indicated agreement (or disagreement), or by the lack of dissent for an item whose mean response suggested "no opinion." / Results for institution-specific practices were not as strong as those for related philosophical ideals, suggesting that while respondents believe NCATE may be satisfied with their MCE efforts, NCATE may not be. / The study uncovered promising possibilities for additional similar research. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 43-06, Section: A, page: 1810. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1982.

This descriptive study investigated the essential elements for the operation of gifted education programs in the state of Florida. Eighteen elements most frequently recommended by the experts were selected from a search of the literature. A mailed questionnaire elicited perceptions of importance of these elements, and the extent to which they existed, from the entire population of Florida's administrators of exceptional education and administrators of gifted programs. / No practical difference was found between the two groups in their respective perceptions of the relative position of importance of the elements. Administrators of exceptional education rated all of the elements significantly lower in importance than the administrators of gifted programs. A high degree of association was present between the administrators' perceptions of importance of an element and the extent to which that element existed in the gifted education programs of Florida's local school districts. Public relations/awareness programs were not present to the extent expected from their perceived importance. Unidentified intervening variables cause gifted programs to decrease progressively from elementary school to secondary school. Gifted programs tend to contain the elements which are considered important. The most important elements were identified to be screening and evaluation, budget, curriculum, administrative responsibilities, and a written philosophy. Elements considered least important were financial aid, flexible acceleration, and the use of outside consultants. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 43-07, Section: A, page: 2226. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1982.

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of three types of review procedures: re-reading, recall exercise, and recall exercise plus re-reading, on the delayed retention of a meaningful prose text that had been read once. / A sample of 909 fourth and fifth grade students from the Fairfax County Public School System, in the state of Virginia, participated in the study. / A 1 x 4 posttest-only control group design was used. The prose text used in the study was a revised version of a section from a children's text entitled: Paws, Hoofs and Flippers, by Olive Earle (1954). The measurement instrument used was a short-answer essay test. The test was judged to have content validity, and the reliability was .70 according to the Spearman-Brown formula. / The study was conducted in three sessions. In the first session of the study, all of the students read the same text. During the second session, students worked with individual booklets that contained different review procedures: (1) a re-reading of the text, or (2) a recall exercise based on the text, or (3) a combination of the recall exercise plus a re-reading, or (4) a placebo activity. / During the third session, one week after the initial session, all of the students answered an identical cued-recall test. / An analysis of covariance was used to test the null hypothesis of no difference among the treatment groups at an alpha of .05. The students' reading levels were used as a covariate. The results showed a significant difference among the treatment groups (p .05). / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 45-04, Section: A, page: 1020. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1984.

In the past ten years, interest in developing an empirically-based technology for designing and organizing information has received renewed attention. An outgrowth of this interest has been the development of a comprehensive technique for designing and organizing instructional content called the Organized Content Technique (OCT). While used in several major training programs, OCT has not been tested to ascertain its utility for improving learning outcomes or saving training time. / This study sought to determine whether presenting content in an instructional sequence developed by OCT made any difference in learner achievement or in time on task when compared to presenting the learner with a prose rendition of the same content. / The study employed a factorial research design with randomization to equate experimental groups. Two categories of ability, high and low, and two instructional treatments having identical instructional designs except for content treatment were used. Content was developed using Organized Content Technique for one treatment and was presented in prose for the other treatment. / Forty-seven junior- and senior-level students enrolled at The University of West Florida in Pensacola, Florida, during the Fall of 1983, served as subjects (Ss) for the study. They were randomly assigned to treatments, yielding approximately 12 data points for each of the four cells. Since Ss were randomly assigned, the individual served as the unit for data analysis. Individual scores on a post-achievement test on learning and time on task served as the dependent variables. / The data analysis revealed the following facts that were significant at the .05 level of probability: (1) Ss receiving the OCT treatment had higher achievement levels than Ss receiving the prose treatment. (2) High-ability Ss had higher achievement scores irrespective of the treatment. (3) High-ability Ss receiving the OCT treatment spent less time on task than high-ability Ss receiving the prose treatment. (4) Low-ability Ss receiving the prose treatment spent less time on task than low-ability Ss receiving the OCT treatment. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 45-09, Section: A, page: 2751. / Thesis (Educat.D.)--The Florida State University, 1984.

The purpose of this study was to provide a full description of five levels of curriculum integration at the middle school level, grounded in practice and described by practitioners through a multiple case study approach. This study focused on these research questions: (1) How does curriculum integration at each reference point on a synthesized continuum occur according to selected middle school interdisciplinary teams of teachers? (2) What is the nature of the interactions of an interdisciplinary middle school team of teachers at each level on the synthesized continuum? (3) How do interdisciplinary teams of middle school teachers progress from one stage of curriculum integration to another? (4) What are the barriers and facilitating factors to curriculum integration encountered by middle school interdisciplinary teams of teachers? / The conceptual framework for this study was based on a synthesized continuum of curriculum integration derived from Faunce and Bossing's (1958), Vars' (1987), Jacob's (1989) and Fogarty's (1991) continuums or models of curriculum integration. The five levels on the revised synthesized continuum included: Departmentalized, Reinforcement, Complementary, Webbed, and Integrated Learning. / The methodological approach was naturalistic inquiry with qualitative data collection and analysis strategies. One middle school interdisciplinary team at each of the five levels of curriculum integration on the synthesized continuum was purposefully selected to participate. Sources for data collection included documents, interviews, observation, and artifacts. The constructivist paradigm was the framework through which the data was collected and analyzed. The data analysis was conducted using content analysis and analytic induction. / In addition to telling each team's story of curriculum integration and refining a rough definition of each level, common themes from the five teams emerged. Common themes such as "torch bearers" are crucial to curriculum integration occurring, the amount of "curriculum conversations" which occurs improves the productive outcomes of common team planning time, and maintaining the composition of working teams longer than a year increases the occurrence of curriculum integration were the results. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-07, Section: A, page: 2230. / Major Professor: Judith L. Irvin. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1992.

The main purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of types of instructional control and the levels of self-regulatory skills at two grade levels on achievement and completion time of instruction. A secondary purpose of this study was to explore student en route data under learner control according to student levels of self-regulatory skills or grade. / A total of ninety-six seventh and ninth grade students participated in the study. Students were randomly assigned to treatment groups. In the learner control group, students were given control over content selection, sequence, amount of practice, amount of review, completion of time, and pace. Students in the program control group were not given control over the instruction except in completion time and pace. All students were given a paper and pencil posttest immediately after completing the instruction and ten days later. / Students with high self-regulatory skills performed better on both tests than those with low self-regulatory skills. However, general results for achievement do not yield a strong effect favoring either program control or learner control. For the completion time of instruction, results indicated that there are no differences between types of instructional control, according to the students levels of self-regulatory skills. A developmental aspect of self-regulatory skills were found by interactions and analysis of en route data. Implications for the further study are also discussed. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-09, Section: A, page: 3094. / Major Professor: Robert M. Morgan. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1992.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of locus of control and field-dependence-independence of hearing-impaired Freshman college learners on achievement while learning rule using skills in either a discovery or an expository instructional method. An aptitude treatment interaction was hypothesized in which learners who were internal in their control orientation in academic situations and/or field independent in their approach to a problem solving task would learn better by a discovery instructional method rather than by an expository instructional method. The converse was expected to be true for those learners who were external in their control orientation and/or field dependent in their approach to problem solving tasks. / Two measures of locus of control (one referred to academic situations, one referred to general expectancies of control) and one measure of field-dependence-independence were administered to 210 learners at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York. The learners were grouped on the basis of their personality test scores and then randomly assigned to either the discovery or expository instructional method. The learners received instruction on rule-using tasks in metric conversion. The posttest was the dependent variable. / Regression analysis was used to analyze the data. No aptitude treatment interaction was found. Math ability, reading ability, field-dependence-independence were significant predictors of achievement. Locus of control and method were not significant main effects. Average posttest performance of field independent learners was significantly higher than that of field intermediate learners in both methods. In the expository method, the average performance of field dependent learners was significantly higher than that of field intermediate learners. / No relationship was found between the two locus of control scales, or between each of the locus of control scales and the Group Embedded Figures Test. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 43-10, Section: A, page: 3206. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1982.

The effectiveness and cost of two alternate models of formative evaluation for printed instructional materials was investigated. Ten instructional designers were divided into two groups: one group of five designers formatively evaluated and revised a printed module of instruction using student data as a basis for making the revisions; the other group of five designers used instructional editing guidelines incorporating the attributes of effective instruction, to make the revisions. Instructional effectiveness was based upon: (a) student performance on the module posttest, and (b) a content analysis of the modules. The data revealed no significant difference in student performance between the two formative evaluation models. However, it cost significantly more to develop the modules in which student data was used. The content analysis also revealed differences between the ten modules in terms of the attributes listed in the instructional editing guidelines. The modules revised by the designers who used the instructional editing guidelines incorporated more of the attributes of effective instruction than the modules revised by the designers who used student data. However, the modules revised on the basis of student data more consistently matched instructional content and posttest items. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 43-09, Section: A, page: 2873. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1982.

The purpose of this study was to determine the attitudes of Florida business education teachers toward perceived barriers to implementing the Florida developed competency-based business education curriculum and to identify characteristics of those business education teachers most likely to receive and adopt curriculum innovation. / A five-part survey instrument was mailed to a proportional random sample of 325 Florida business teachers in secondary schools, vocational-technical centers, and community colleges. A co-relational descriptive design was used for the study to investigate attitudes of the teachers toward change and barriers to implementing the competency-based business education curriculum. / One-way Analysis of Variance was used to determine differences in teachers' attitudes toward barriers to implementing competency-based curriculum and change. Results of these analyses indicated that vocational-technical center teachers saw fewer barriers to competency-based business education curriculum implementation while secondary teachers saw the greatest number of barriers. Those barriers to competency-based business education curriculum implemetation most often identified were lack of time and clerical assistance. Vocational-technical center business teachers were found to be more receptive to change while secondary business teachers were found to be least receptive. / Stepwise multiple regression analysis indicated that the most predictive demographic variables for perceived barriers were the type of school, the amount of inservice, related work experience, and working in the vocational geographic region (IV) of the state. The more inservice the teacher had received, the fewer barriers were perceived. This was also true for specific classifications of barriers for the amount of related work experience and geographic region. Amount of inservice, type of school, and the number of students were the most predictive of teachers' attitudes toward change. / A correlation between the disposition toward change and barriers showed the strongest relationship to exist between barriers and individualization of instruction/behavioral objectives and team teaching/differentiated staffing. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 44-07, Section: A, page: 2031. / Thesis (Educat.D.)--The Florida State University, 1983.

Investigation was made to (1) accumulate researcher visual, auditory, and kinesthetic left and right hemispheric reading behaviors and to (2) determine if modality-specific brain dominance patterns were related to reading achievement. From previous research similar numbers of left and right hemispheric reading behaviors were accumulated implying the importance of each hemisphere to reading. When 346 right handed, seven and eight year old children's reading achievement was compared using ANOVA statistical design to eight varied modality-specific hemispheric dominance patterns, the following resulted: (1) neither children with predominantly left nor right hemispheric dominance patterns were significantly greater in achievement, (2) children with crossed dominance patterns were weaker in achievement than children with unilateral dominance of either hemisphere, and (3) children, comprising 8.7% of the sample who were right handed with heavy left handed latency and who were more right ear dominant, had significantly lower reading achievement at the 0.21 level using F-Test measures than any other hemispheric pattern. Typically, though statistically no longer as significant, these pupils were also visually dominant with their left eye creating a double crossed dominance with their left eye creating a double crossed dominance between left eye and right hand and right ear and left handed latency. / The value of this study lies in demonstrating that the left hemisphere is no more important in both reading functions and achievement than the right hemisphere, both appear similarly involved in reading behaviors and achievement. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 44-03, Section: A, page: 0654. / Thesis (Educat.D.)--The Florida State University, 1983.