Application of Airborne Television to Public Education

In an effort to bring the advantages of television teaching to the maximum number of public schools, particularly those in hilly or sparsely settled parts of the country, a project has been launched to provide airborne transmission of six simultaneous school lesson program. Coverage area is increased approximately 20 to 1 by this means compared to the usual ground station coverage. Airborne transmission is the most economical and effective use of the available (UHF) frequency spectrum. Results already established regarding the use of television as a teaching medium are projected via an airplane flying at 23,000 feet altitude over an area covering parts of six Midwestern States. Educational advantages and problems inherent in ground station TV are intensified in this larger coverage area, and planning is governed accordingly. Technical problems include multiplex transmission of six lessons simultaneously, keeping the airplane on station, accommodation of transmitting equipment in the airplane, and determination of bandwidth for optimum picture quality.     

Freizeitgestaltung der Schüler Höherer Lehranstalten in Slowenien/Jugoslawien (Fortsetzung)

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Norm-Referenced Test Gains May Be Real: A Response to John Jacob Cannell

Finding Cannell's evidence that large proportions of students are scoring above median levels "compelling," the author discusses possible causes, including recent achievement gains, inadequate norms, focusing of curriculums on test content coverage, and teaching to the tests.     

Memory for Relevant and Irrelevant Information: Evidence for Deficient Inhibitory Processes in Language/ Learning Disabled Children

The present study examined whether language/learning disabled children have greater difficulty than nondisabled children suppressing information that becomes irrelevant during a sentence processing and memory task. During study trials, children were asked to predict and remember the terminal nouns for a series of sentences that highly constrained a terminal noun. For half of the study trials (fillers) the child's prediction was confirmed by presenting the child with the expected ending (e.g., “Butterflies fly by flapping their . . .wings.”). For the remaining study trials (critical trials), however, the sentence ending expected by the child was disconfirmed with a low-probability ending (target noun). Thus, when presented with the sentence, “We made a sandwich with peanut butter and . . . ,” the child's prediction (“jelly”) was disconfirmed with a different ending (“bananas”). Memory for the disconfirmed and target nouns of critical study trials were subsequently tested implicitly with a new sentence-completion task. In this case, memory for disconfirmed and target nouns that had been associated with individual study sentences were measured in terms of priming effects. The analysis of priming effects indicated that language/learning disabled children experienced greater difficulty than nondisabled children inhibiting the activation of irrelevant information (disconfirmed nouns) and sustaining the activation of relevant information (target nouns) during a verbal memory task. These results were discussed in terms of their implications for some of the memory and language difficulties of language/learning disabled children.