The effects of the use of activities of sapa on the oral communication skills of disadvantaged kindergarten children

The study investigated the effects of participation in the activities of Science-A Process Approach (SAPA) on the oral communication skills of disadvantaged kindergarten children. Experimental-control group, pretest-posttest research design was employed. The investigator designed the Test of Oral Communication Skills (TOCS) to measure students' oral communication skills. Two experimental groups (one morning and one afternoon, N = 52) and two control groups (one morning and one afternoon, N = 48) were randomly assigned from two kindergarten classrooms (morning and afternoon classes in each) in an inner-city school in Columbus, Ohio. The investigator provided the science instruction to all students. Experimental subjects received 22 half-hour lessons from exercises a through k of Part A, SAPA. Control subjects received 22 lessons from Springboards to Science, a teacher demonstration, class discussion type of kindergarten curricuoum used in the school system. The treatment period spanned 12 academic weeks. Analysis of variance of TOCS pretest scores showed no significant differences among any of the means of the four groups. Analysis of covariance of TOCS posttest scores revealed differences significant at .05 or beyond in the mean scores of the experimental groups and control groups for total oral and total receiving skills and for six of the eight subskills measured by TOCS. Application of the Tukey (b) test revealed that experimental group mean scores exceeded control group mean scores in every TOCS skill and subskill area and that in total oral transmitting subskills both experimental group mean scores were significantly greater at .05 level or beyond than corresponding mean scores for both control groups. Within the parameters of this study, it may be concluded that when the activities and teaching strategies of SAPA curriculum are presented to disadvantaged kindergarten children, their oral communication skills, especially the transmitting (speaking) skills, are clearly enhanced.     

Contextual associations in trace conditioning

Rats were given tone-footshock pairings with a 0-, 10-, or 30-sec trace interval between tone offset and shock onset. Half the rats within each trace interval were tested for their conditioned fear of the tone through a lick suppression procedure; the remaining rats were evaluated for their fear of the background or contextual cues through their avoidance of the compartment in which conditioning had occurred. Less conditioning was observed to the tone with increasing trace intervals. However, conditioned fear of the context increased with increases in the trace duration. The ability of the more predictive stimulus, the tone, to overshadow the contextual cues was determined by the tone’s temporal contiguity with the footshock. The need to incorporate temporal parameters within current theories of conditioning is discussed.     

Reliability and sources of control of preference for signaled shock

Five experiments investigated the reliability of, and a possible explanation for, the preference for signaled shock (PSS) phenomenon, in which animals show a preference for signaled over unsignaled, unmodifiable shock. Experiment 1 demonstrated the generality of our previous PSS shuttlebox data. In an attempt to explain some of the studies in which a failure to obtain a PSS has been reported, Experiments 2 and 3 found that under certain conditions the PSS effect could be overridden by an innate preference for dark; however, the series of experiments in toto speaks clearly for the robustness of the phenomenon. Consistent with the recently proposed “crossover consequence hypothesis,” Experiments also revealed that shuttling behavior during manifestations of PSS is not randomly distributed in time. However, Experiments 4 and 5 found that PSS could not generally be attributed to an interaction between the acquired aversiveness of the signal and the spatially asymmetrical probability of shuttling being punished, as proposed by this hypothesis.     

On the dynamics of a class of optimum routing problems

A particular class of routing problems associated with demand actuated transportation systems requires the repeated regeneration of minimum or optimum routes as a part of the more general routing problem. The generation or regeneration of routes by methods other than classical minimum route solutions is discussed. A general system model for processing demands in a demand actuated transportation or routing system is presented and discussed.     

Second-order conditioning using a contextual stimulus as S1

Three experiments investigated the question of whether a spatial stimulus, a context, could function as S₁ in a second-order conditioning procedure. In each experiment, rat subjects were presented with S₁-US pairings by being given footshocks in one of two contexts. Forty-eight hours later, the experimental groups received S₂-S₁ pairings, during which a tone was presented in the training context. As measured by a lick-suppression test administered in a third context, rats were more fearful of the tone if it occurred in the context in which they had previously been shocked. The training context in each experiment apparently served to establish second-order fear conditioning to the tone.     

Media Production

Michael Murray's The Videotape Book: A Basic Guide to Portable TV Production (New York: Taplinger, 1975—$9.95),

Rudy Bretz's Handbook for Producing Educational and Public-Access Programs for Cable Television (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Educational Technology Publications, 1976— price not given, paper)

Paul Yerbic's Les Animations Simples Pour la Vidéo Éducative (Agence de Coopération Culturelle et Technique, Les Cahiers de Direct, 19 Avenue de Messine, 75008 Paris, France—25 French francs, paper)

Marlin Skiles' Music Scoring for TV & Motion Pictures (Blue Ridge Summit, Pa.: TAB Books, 1976—$12.95)

Arthur Wimer and Dale Brix's Workbook for Radio and TV News Editing and Writing (Dubuque, Iowa: Wm C. Brown, 1975—$7.95, paper).

Judith L. Burken's Introduction to Reporting (Dubuque, Iowa: C. Brown, 1976—price not given, paper).     

Conditioned inhibition in taste aversion learning: Testing methodology and empirical status

Learning & Behavior - Several assays were used in assessing conditioned inhibition within a taste aversion procedure. Following Pavlovian conditioned inhibition training, in which one taste was...     

Feedback multilevel control for continuous dynamic systems

An iterative technique for the derivation of a nearly optimal feedback control law for continuous dynamic systems with separable cost functions is developed based on the fundamental concepts of multilevel control. The developed technique comprises two major and subsequent stages. In the first stage, a two-level optimization structure is devised using the coordination by control method. An identification processthen follows in order to determine the constant gains of the dynamic controller utilizing the discrete quasilinearization algorithm. A three-level control structure is thus provided for the overall technique which can adaptively compute the unknown gains of the dynamic controller.