The local television director: Part II of a continuing study

Leveling‐off of construction of new TV stations and transfer from live to film operations at both network and local station levels has occasioned considerable concern on the part of students and teachers of broadcasting. The question of the practical value of university broadcasting instruction can be answered best by studying station practice, and the market for the university‐trained product.     

Telecommunications in Teacher Education: reflections on the first Virtual Team Case Competition

ABSTRACT

In the spring of 1994, the University of Virginia piloted the first Virtual Team Case Competition. This event combined telecommunications and case‐method teaching to promote the use of technology and problem solving among teams of pre‐service teachers from three countries. Participating teams subscribed to a general mailing list to receive instructions, a schedule of events, and a case based on a real classroom situation. Teams had approximately ten days to email their analyses of the case to judges and to administrators of the competition. Judges scored each team's responses to the teaching case and to follow‐up questions and sent their evaluations by private email to the administrators. Results of the competitition were then posted over the mailing list. This paper describes both how the competition worked and what we learned from our experiment with the first Virtual Team Case Competition.     

Academic self-concept, interest, grades, and standardized test scores: reciprocal effects models of causal ordering

Reciprocal effects models of longitudinal data show that academic self-concept is both a cause and an effect of achievement. In this study this model was extended to juxtapose self-concept with academic interest. Based on longitudinal data from 2 nationally representative samples of German 7th-grade students (Study 1: N = 5,649, M age = 13.4; Study 2: N = 2,264, M age = 13.7 years), prior self-concept significantly affected subsequent math interest, school grades, and standardized test scores, whereas prior math interest had only a small effect on subsequent math self-concept. Despite stereotypic gender differences in means, linkages relating these constructs were invariant over gender. These results demonstrate the positive effects of academic self-concept on a variety of academic outcomes and integrate self-concept with the developmental motivation literature.     

Assessment of the Motivational Reactions of Teachers to a School-Based Performance Award Program

The Charlotte–Mecklenburg Schools school-based performance award program (SBPA) for teachers and classified staff is an accountability program that measures and sets goals for student achievement, provides numerous performance enablers for teachers (such as professional development and information about best practices), and awards monetary bonuses to teachers and staff in schools that meet their goals. Based on expectancy and goal-setting theory, an interview protocol was used to assess teachers motivational reactions to the program. Teachers reported that the goals were specific, understandable, focused, and challenging; there were concerns, however, about being able to meet ever higher future goals. The usefulness of the performance enablers received mixed reactions. Bonuses were viewed as appropriate and an appreciated form of recognition, though of too small an amount. Helping students learn and seeing them meet achievement goals were reported to be more potent motivators than the bonus per se. Comparison of these reactions to those from teachers under the Kentucky SBPA showed both common and contrasting impacts. Numerous implications for future research, and for the design and implementation of SBPA programs, were suggested.     

Qualitative aspects of gain on achievement tests

Summary and Conclusion The basic questions involved in this investigation were the effect of initial standing and item difficulty on the gain established on final over initial measures in achievement testing. The hypotheses were advanced that the use of gain discriminated against bright students on two counts; first, by limiting possibility for gain and second, that equal gains might really represent different levels of performance. It has been shown that the use of a measure of achievement, the effectiveness index, which is independent of initial standing, shows a higher positive correlation with intelligence than the correlation obtained between gain and intelligence. The use of partial correlation to hold the factor of initial standing constant raised the relation found between gain and intelligence in 11 out of 12 cases, indicating that the higher initial standing of brighter students tended to limit their performance. Further, it has been shown that the gain of bright students tends to be established on more difficult items. In addition, the film apparently facilitated the success of students with above average intelligence on difficult items since the relationship found between intelligence and gain or nongain on test items was markedly higher in experimental than in control sections. To the extent that the gains made on the tests employed in this investigation are representative of gains made on achievement tests in general, in pretest and posttest situations, it may be concluded that bright students are discriminated against when gain is the measure of performance. The bright students must overcome the twin difficulties of establishing their gain on more difficult items in competition with students who havemore items on which improvement, i.e., gain, may be established. It is obvious that groups and individuals differing widely in their initial performance on tests should not be compared using gain as a criterion unless there is some compensation for these factors. This paper funishes additional evidence relative to a statistical procedure—the “Effectiveness Index”—discussed by Hovland, Lumsdaine, and Sheffield inExperiments on Mass Communication. It was originally presented to Section Q of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at the St. Louis Meeting, December 1952. The Study was made possible by a grant from the University of Nebraska Research Council. Dr. Herbert A. Smith is Associate Professor of Secondary Education and Supervisor of Science, the University of Nebraska.