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The purpose of this study was to detect the influence, if any, of high or low expectancy with regard to hypnotizability on the part of the hypnotist and subject. The result was measured by the subject's score on the SHSS:A. The time each subject took to complete the SHSS:A was also recorded. Data were analyzed using a 2 x 2 analysis of variance (ANOVA) with experimenter expectancy (high vs. low) and subject expectancy (high vs. low) as variables (as shown in table 4.1). Two measures were examined: time taken to complete the SHSS:A and the score received. Since individual experimenters may differ in administration of the SHSS:A even with safeguards to insure uniformity, possible differences in experimenter performance were examined in a 1-way ANOVA with the experimenters as the variables (3 levels). There were no significant differences between the scores of any of the subject groups and no interaction found between any of them. There was a significant result in the time taken for the high expectancy subjects (SE) which was shorter (36.438 min.) than the low expectancy subjects (SE) (41.471 min.). The primary result does not support the contention that hypnotizability as measured on the SHSS:A is affected significantly by the expectations of either the subject or the hypnotist. The secondary result indicates a significant effect on the subjects who were told that they were highly hypnotizability which was not directly measured by the SHSS:A, i.e., time. That may be the result of an interaction between those subjects and the hypnotists. They may have communicated their heightened belief in their hypnotizability to the hypnotists in subtle ways which enabled the hypnotists to deliver the hypnotizability test more quickly.

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The purpose of this study is to analyze high school teachers' and coaches' perceptions of participation in extracurricular activities and their relationship to academic achievement. This study investigated teachers' and coaches' perceptions of the benefits of a student participating in extracurricular activities, and how participation in school-based extracurricular sports and activities affect the students' academic achievement. Survey data are presented and reviewed, and the significance of extracurricular activities in overall achievement of students was discussed. Standardized testing has put tremendous pressure on school districts to raise academic achievement scores, while continuing to face necessary budget cuts. In the process of prioritizing funding, monies allotted for extracurricular activities are impacted. Some districts have seriously considered making students "pay to play" various sports in order to relieve budgetary constraints. This study addressed this problem by conducting a quantitative study. Teachers and coaches from fourteen Capital Area Intermediate Unit high schools took part in a survey to identify the benefits of participation in extracurricular activities. / Educational Administration

Program evaluation in the fields of second language acquisition (SLA) and teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) has a history dating from the 1960's. The focus of previous program evaluations has been on language achievement at the end of the program of study (Lynch, 1996). However, to improve or maintain program quality, teacher education of future foreign language instructors is essential; thus, improvements in the quality and/or control of teacher education programs is also important. The primary purpose of this study is to propose and test a multi-faceted approach to program evaluation that originates from the administrative side of two graduate programs in Applied Linguistics. This marks the first time in the field that this approach has been implemented. First, time series enrollment models were examined to investigate the overall stability of the two graduate education programs for non-traditional students from 1993 to 2010 (for the Master's programs) and 1995 to 2010 (for the doctoral programs). Second, logistic regression models were examined to investigate the characteristics of the students who did and did not graduate from the programs. Third, event history Cox regression models were examined to investigate the amount of time spent by the graduate students to complete the degree using potential demographic and enrollment pattern factors as predictors. Finally, a dynamic model was formulated and tested to simulate the program's potential future enrollments based in part on the results of the prior model analyses and publically available data. The results indicated the potential for developing a relatively strong time series enrollment prediction model for near future enrollments using the data available in the administrative database. However, the student success/failure models and event history program study time prediction models were relatively weak and the results indicated the difficulty of predicting whether students will successfully complete the graduate programs using data typically collected from the students when they enter the program. The simulation results showed a potential decline in enrollments over the next decade mainly due to the decline of the 18-year-old student population in Japan, the decreasing size of the foreign language teacher population, the long, gradual recession in Japan, and the revision of university faculty employment status by the Japanese Ministry of Education. / CITE/Language Arts

The performance of three popular procedures for detecting differential item functioning (DIF), the Mantel-Haenszel (MH), the Simultaneous Item Bias (SIB), and the Logistic Regression (LR) procedures were investigated and compared in three different studies. The first study compares the MH and the SIB procedures with respect to their Type I error rates and power to detect uniform DIF. Data for the study were simulated to reflect a variety of conditions. The results revealed that both the MH and the SIB procedures were equally powerful in detecting uniform DIF under most of the studied conditions. The SIB procedure showed higher detection rates than the MH procedure as the ability distribution differences increased. The second study investigated the distributions of the SIB and two variations (with and without the continuity correction in the MH statistic), to determine whether or not their distributional assumptions held. The results showed that the SIB statistic generally had the expected distributions when the sample size of the reference and the focal groups exceeded 200. The distributions assumptions of the MH statistic without the continuity correction were more readily met than those of the MH statistic with the continuity correction for all the studied conditions. The third study investigated the MH, the SIB, and the LR procedures with respect to their Type I error rates and power to detect non-uniform DIF. Data for the study were simulated under a variety of conditions. The results revealed that both the SIB and LR procedures were equally powerful in detecting non-uniform DIF under most conditions. The MH procedure was not very effective in identifying non-uniform DIF items that showed disordinal interactions. The investigation of the Type I error rates in all the three studies showed that they were within the expected limits for the MH procedure, higher than expected for the SIB and LR procedures with the SIB results showing an overall increase of about 1% over the LR results. With respect to power, the results show that the MH statistic was very effective in detecting only uniform DIF; both the SIB and LR procedures were very effective in detecting uniform as well as non-uniform DIF.

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