The study was concerned with the variable of staging which is a component of text structure. Staging is known to affect the comprehension process of proficient readers. Two passages developed and analysed for staging by Clements (1976) were used in this study to investigate the effects staging has on the readers' comprehension of the passages. The two passages were identical in content and different only in the staging level at which information occurred. Ten experimental texts were developed from Clements' two passages. The texts enabled (i) the comparison of the effects of supplying high, medium or low staged information to the readers on their ability to replace cloze deletions in the rest of the text: and (ii) the comparison of the effects of supplying intact the staging categories Old Topic, New Topic, Old Comment, or New Comment on the readers' ability to replace cloze deletions in the rest of the text. The cloze replacement scores were taken as measures of the readers' comprehension of the text. The subjects used in this study were a mixture of male and female, undergraduate and postgraduate students at Riverina College of Advanced Education. The height of staged information and the staging category of the information were found to have no significant affect upon the readers' comprehension of the texts. However, it is suggested 111 that this may be an artifact of the use of cloze procedure as the measure of comprehension. Suggestions are made for further research to clarify the usefulness of cloze as a research tool in this area and to support or reject the conclusion of this study.

A study of the nature of entrepreneurial activity and its use in furthering our understanding of small business establishment. An ethnographic study is presented of the business perspectives of a group of business entrepreneurs in the Riverina region of N.S.W. and a conceptual framework is developed for consideration of various qualitative issues involved in establishing a small business.

In November, 1986, Mrs Lorna Ireland; Principal of Junee Primary School in the Riverina Region of New South Wales; approached a Senior Lecturer in Mathematics Education at Riverina-Murray Institute of Higher Education in Wagga Wagga; seeking his involvement in a project aimed to assist teachers at the school with their mathematics teaching. In addition to the planned involvement in 1987 of this mathematics educator, the school was also to be a pilot school for the trialling of a strand of the New South Wales Education Department's Draft Mathematics Curriculum and a participating school in the numeracy component of the federal government's Basic Learning in Primary Schools program. This study documents the mathematics education activities which involved Junee Primary School teachers in 1987. It focuses on the RMIHE involvement in the school but considers this in the context of broader mathematics curriculum activity. The process of change is described within a theoretical framework derived from a review of relevant literature. The research methodology employed is fundamentally ethnographic and relies on the collection of qualitative data to derive descriptions of people and events. The data analysis relates to curriculum change, the role of the change agent and the role of mathematics educators in school mathematics programs. A discussion of outcomes highlights the strengths of an approach to curriculum change which had its genesis in the school rather than in some external agency. The generation of problems and issues and the resolution of these are features of the analysis which tracks the progress towards professional development autonomy of one group of teachers.