A STUDY OF THE EFFECTS OF OUT‐OF‐LEVEL TESTING WITH POOR READERS IN THE INTERMEDIATE GRADES

Forty‐seven fourth‐and‐fifth grade students whose raw scores on the Gates‐MacGinitie Level D (on‐level test) were determined to be unsuitable were administered an out‐of‐level test (Level C) to ascertain whether the out‐of‐level test would be a more appropriate test for those students. Two questions were addressed in this study. First, are there significant differences in students’ derived scores on the Gates‐MacGinitie when an on‐level test (Level D) that is judged to be unsuitable is compared to an out‐of‐level test (Level C)? Second, is use of an out‐of‐level test more suitable in terms of Roberts’ criterion of the raw scores achieved by the students? There were no significant differences between the derived scores from on‐level and out‐of‐level testing for each of the subtests. The out‐of‐level raw scores did fall within the accepted range for the test to be considered suitable and reliable.     

Judgments of grammaticalness: A partial replication and extension

This study is a partial replication and extension of a study by Maclay and Sleator (1961) involving judgments of grammaticalness. In an effort to overcome various methodological shortcomings in the earlier study, 152 male subjects were asked to judge a series of 36 word sequences on the dimensions of grammaticalness, meaningfulness, and ordinariness under five different modes of stimulus presentation. Results of the present study failed to confirm the findings reported earlier by Maclay and Sleator. The significance of the results is discussed in relation to several basic issues in the scaling of judgments of grammaticalness.     

Combining letter-matching and tone discrimination: Evidence of automatic perceptual and spatial congruity effects

Dual task and priming paradigms were combined to investigate the distinction between automatic and attentional processes. Subjects in two experiments performed a primed letter-matching and a tone discrimination task separately and concurrently. The interval between prime onset and letter pair (SOA) was varied from 50 to 500 msec. Cost-benefit analyses in Experiment 1 indicated that primes that matched target letter pairs began to facilitate performance at an SOA of 150 msec. Primes inhibited performance when they mismatched identical letter pairs at SOA 100. In the dual-task situation, the benefits of priming letter targets were reflected in probe latencies with no evidence of concurrent costs in tone latencies. Experiment 2 revealed that two tasks could be primed simultaneously as effectively as when each was primed alone. Findings are discussed in reference to Posner and Snyder's (1975a, 1975b) two-process theory of priming and the applicability of a secondary task technique.