Professional speakers often use simple mental recipes to organize impromptu talks. The author taught these recipes to his high school composition students and used a timed trial format to give them practice in rapidly outlining their thoughts on a given topic. Thirteen of these recipes are provided. (SJL)

Discusses the problems of using chronometric analysis, a common cognitive psychological method, for educational assessment. Suggests that cognitive assessment has not reached the precision needed to analyze individual differences. (FMW)

Indiana fourth graders received keyboarding instruction 30 minutes per day for 4 weeks with 30 minutes of daily practice thereafter. Comparison with their scores in the fifth grade revealed an increase in speed of nine words per minute. Accuracy did not change significantly. (SK)

This study examined the influence of time press, specific stimulus, and type of creativity prompt on fluency and flexibility scores of 75 undergraduates. Results suggest that time press has a strong, and typically linear influence on both fluency and flexibility scores. A significant difference across stimuli was observed for flexibility, but not…

Writing assessment essentially juxtaposes two elements: how "good writing" is to be defined, and how "good measurement" of that writing is to be carried out. The timed test is often used in large-scale L2 writing assessments because it is considered to provide reliable measurement. It is, however, highly inauthentic. One way of enhancing…

How information is represented in visual images was explored in five experiments where subjects judged whether or not various properties were appropriate for given animals. The results support a constructivist notion of imagery, and the idea that images may act as analogues to percepts. (Author/DEP)

The validity of current standardized competency tests for writing is in doubt as is the need for such testing at all. Some tests, especially those requiring little writing, may not be testing what they purport to test (content validity). Instructional validity (testing what has actually been taught) raises the issue that what is being tested is…

The three parts of Vancouver's survey test in mathematics--computation, concepts, and problems--for grade 6 are presented. The parts contain 36, 24, and 12 items respectively. (For related document, see TM 002 473.) (KM)

The South Central Research Library Council was asked if the services of the Bibliographic and Reference Center, a subsidiary of the Council, located at the Cornell University Libraries could be extended to libraries outside its region. To date, the Center has been handling a limited number of requests from non-member libraries without interfering…

This paper proposes an item selection algorithm that can be used to neutralize the effect of time limits in computer adaptive testing. The method is based on a statistical model for the response-time distributions of the test takers on the items in the pool that is updated each time a new item has been administered. Predictions from the model are…

Experiments were designed and carried out in an attempt to identify some parameters relating to ease of manual searching in library catalogs. A comparison of the difficulty of searching the same file in card form and book form indicated that searching the book catalog generally requires more time. (4 references) (Author/NH)

How the dual-task interference effects, observed when subjects attempted to simultaneously perform two simple tasks, are related to capacity limitations in perceptual processing of complex visual displays was studied. Results for a total of 110 undergraduates in 6 experiments support a 2-component theory of divided attention. (SLD)

An alternating treatments design was used to evaluate the effectiveness of an educational program that combined timings, peer tutoring, positive-practice overcorrection, and performance feedback on mathematics fluency in four elementary school students with mathematics skills deficits. Results are discussed in terms of combining intervention…

Discusses how current scholarship argues against one-shot, high-stakes writing tasks. Presents work from students that were part of a team-taught curriculum that coordinated writing and reading classes. Designs activities that would provide a core of material for students to draw on in their final testing situations. (SG)