The meaning of response categories: How often is “occasionally,” “often,” and “very often”?

Samples of undergraduates from 30 colleges and universities responded in two ways to statements about how often they had engaged in various activities: first by indicating never, occasionally, often, or very often, and second by indicating the number of times they had engaged in the activity. Comparisons of the two sets of responses indicates that: (1) there are wide individual differences in the meaning attributed to each response category; (2) despite individual differences, the group data show clear modal differences between occasionally and often and between often and very often; (3) the median difference in the meaning of each of the response categories is very small between one institution and the next and between types of institutions; and (4) based on the present data, there is no compelling need to develop separate norms for different types of institutions.Presented at the 1981 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, April 13–17, Los Angeles.     

Post-secondary educators' professional development: Investigation of an online approach to enhancing teaching and learning

Faculty in post-secondary institutions must continually reassess, refine, and revise their teaching, yet it is a challenge for them to gain this professional development with heavy teaching responsibilities and high demands on their time. Creating Optimum Learning Environments (CREOLE) is a collaborative project between one community college and one university to develop an online training program for post-secondary education faculty on the basic principles of teaching and learning and the development of online courses. Four independent modules were developed and taught in a one semester format for educators throughout the U.S. The goal of this research was to identify the strenghts and challenges of this course; determine the changes in pedagogical practice of the participating faculty members; and to examine the resulting changes in participants' course materials to reflect learning and motivation theories, and appropriate online learning strategies. Methods included pre- and post-surveys of the participants, interviews, document analysis, and instructors' reflections. Results demonstrated high expectations from all participants, difficulty in forming a sustained learning community, continuing challenge in technological aspects, and requirement for intense instructor involvement to maintain morale.     

Mathematical learning difficulties and PASS cognitive processes

This study examined the relationships between mathematical learning difficulties (MLD) and the planning, attention, simultaneous, successive (PASS) theory of cognitive processing. The Cognitive Assessment System (CAS) was used to measure the PASS processes for a group of 267 Dutch students with MLD who attended either general or special education. The results showed that students with MLD performed lower than their peers on all CAS scales and that the MLD group contained many students with cognitive weaknesses in planning or successive processing. Moreover, students who had specific difficulties with the acquisition of basic math facts, the automatization of such facts, or word-problem solving were found to have distinct PASS cognitive profiles. In order to investigate the relationships between cognitive abilities and improvement in the mastery of basic math facts and problem solving, 165 of the students with MLD were given a special multiplication intervention. It appeared that the effectiveness of this particular intervention did not differ across the groups of students with specific cognitive weaknesses.     

Effects of Fact Retrieval Tutoring on Third‐Grade Students with Math Difficulties with and without Reading Difficulties

The purpose of this study was to assess the efficacy of fact retrieval tutoring as a function of math difficulty (MD) subtype, that is, whether students have MD alone (MD‐only) or have concurrent difficulty with math and reading (MDRD). Third graders (n= 139) at two sites were randomly assigned, blocking by site and MD subtype, to four tutoring conditions: fact retrieval practice, conceptual fact retrieval instruction with practice, procedural computation/estimation instruction, and control (no tutoring). Tutoring occurred for 45 sessions over 15 weeks for 15–25 minutes per session. Results provided evidence of an interaction between tutoring condition and MD subtype status for assessment of fact retrieval. For MD‐only students, students in both fact retrieval conditions achieved comparably and outperformed MD‐only students in the control group as well as those in the procedural computation/estimation instruction group. By contrast, for MDRD students, there were no significant differences among intervention conditions.