(a) initial levels of ability, personality, and interests, and (b) concurrent changes in interests, personality and a few major features of environment. Procedures. A sample of 270 subjects who were initially tested as eighth and ninth graders in project 701 will be tested again as tenth and eleventh graders. A second group of 200 students in grades 10 and 11 will be tested in the winter of 1961-62 and again 18 months later to cross-validate internal relationships on a new sample. The data will be gathered with the Thurstone Primary Abilities Test, the Culture Fair Intelligence Test, the Child Personality Questionnaire, a battery tentatively designated as the School Motivational Analysis Test, the Iowa Achievement Tests, and an objective measure of the home environment. An analysis will be made within one period of the covariation of changes occurring in the various areas of measurement. A second analysis between the two periods will sequentially relate changes in one period to changes in the next. RAYMOND B. CATTELL, research professor in psychology, Laboratory of Personality Assessment, University of Illinois, Urbana. Project 1411. Duration: 3 years. Sept. 1961 to Aug. 1964. Federal contribution: $65,919. 649899-62 RESEARCH ON: III. CURRICULUM AND INSTRUCTION A Modern Mathematics Program as It Pertains to the Interrelationship of Mathematical Content, Teaching Methods, and Classroom Atmosphere Problem. For the past 5 years, the Syracuse University Madison Project has been engaged in developing and testing various new curriculum materials in mathematics, for use in grades 2 to 10. This demonstration project seeks to evaluate these curriculum materials. Objectives.—(1) To build a functioning "modern" mathematics program in a number of schools so as to attempt to solve relevant problems in curriculum, pedagogy, and school organization; and (2) to record as much relevant data as possible during the process of implementation. Procedures.-The new curriculum materials will be tested in about 13 schools with about 20 classes. Project personnel in the participating schools will teach demonstration classes, observe and assist the regular teachers in the conduct of classes, conduct seminars on content material, record classroom lessons for subsequent group discussion, and work with principals and supervisors. Wherever possible, various local people in each school system will assume responsibility for additional supervision and for close collaboration with project personnel. An extensive program of data collection and interpretation that may include Q-sort techniques, tape recordings, written tests, and other devices for studying the effect on teacher attitudes, teacher behavior, teaching of related subjects, student achievement, student attitudes, etc., will be used to evaluate the project. In addition, a short interdisciplinary conference of 8 or 10 participants will be held to complete the final specifications for the evaluative instruments. ROBERT B. DAVIS, associate professor of mathematics and education, Syracuse University, Syracuse, N.Y. Project D-022. Duration: 1 year, 1 month. 30 Visual and Auditory Efficiency and Its Relationship to Reading in Children Problem. To determine the relation between ability to alternate modalities, differences in efficiency in modalities, and their relations to each other and to reading achievement. Objective.—To find out whether ability to alternate from one modality to another efficiently has any relation to reading achievement, a relation suggested by prior research. Subsidiary interests center about age changes in this ability to alternate and the generality of this skill across different learning, memory, and perceptual tasks and materials. Procedure and Design. The population will consist of approximately 300 children divided among the first, third, and fifth grades. Each subject will be given tests to measure modality preference and efficiency, watchkeeping, and bimodal reaction time; most of the tests have been devised for this specific purpose by the Institute. Learning and modality preference measures will be constructed for this purpose, also a complete reading test evaluation, and a brief, nonverbal measure of intelligence. Other measures will be used as well—an experiential-demographic scale, a questionnaire to teachers, and a scanning test to measure the child's visual reading pattern. These measures are for analyses subsidiary to the major purpose of the study. The major analyses will be concerned with the relation of the various measures of modality efficiency and preference to (a) one another, (b) reading achievement, and (c) age. MARTIN DEUTSCH, associate professor, codirector Institute for Developmental Studies, and ALFRED M. FREEDMAN, chairman, Department of Psychiatry, New York Medical College, New York. Project 1099. Duration: 2 years, 6 months. Language Ability in Grades 7, 8, and 9 Problem. This study traces the development of language ability in the same group of subjects through 3 years of junior high school, grades 7, 8, and 9. Objectives.-The basic hypothesis to be tested is that learning equips the individual with broad patterns of response rather than oneto-one relationships. More specifically, the following hypotheses will be tested: (1) Subjects who develop skill in the spoken language, using pitch, juncture, and stress effectively for purposes of communication, will develop the skills of writing, reading, and listening more quickly than those who do not develop the same degree of skill in the spoken language; (2) subjects with the highest degree of ability in speech and writing will use a more varied and flexible pattern of syntax than subjects with less ability; (3) there will not be a uniform development of all four areas of the language arts even though there will be a tendency for overall development to follow the gains of each individual subject; (4) those subjects who manifest the highest skill in language ability will also be those who use relational words (e.g. moreover, although, because, inasmuch as, etc.) more often and more accurately than the other subjects; (5) those subjects with the highest ratings on school attendance will also be those who rank highest on development of skill in language; (6) those subjects who have the most interaction with other persons will develop the skills of language more rapidly than those whose contacts with other persons are more limited; (7) subjects who have high socioeconomic status will develop language power more rapidly and to a greater competency than subjects who have low socioeconomic status; and (8) subjects with high ability in language will express such matters as tentativeness and supposition more frequently-their language will reflect flexibility rather than rigidity of thinking and reacting. Procedures.-The sample for this longitudinal study will consist of 230 seventh-grade students who will be followed through grades 8 and 9. The data gathered will include transcripts of the subjects' speech, writing, reading, and listening effectiveness, along with health, mental ability, socioeconomic status, school achievement, and school attendance. The transcripts will be gathered in identical situations for all subjects; speech will be recorded on audiographs and tape recorders, typed by specially trained typists, and analyzed according to codes developed in an earlier study. Analyses will include amount of language, coherence, hypotaxis (subordination), errors in usage, style of speech, control of writing, amount and quality of reading, ability to handle arithmetic symbols, health in relation to language, functions of language used by children, and other pertinent data. WALTER LOBAN, associate professor of education and supervisor of the teaching of English, University of California, Berkeley. Project 1131. Duration: 3 years. Jan. 1961 to Dec. 1963. Federal contribution: $47,939. A Study of the Effectiveness of Beginning the Teaching of Reading in Kindergarten Problem.-The main focus is upon an experimental comparison of the effectiveness of beginning the teaching of reading in kindergarten with beginning such teaching in the first grade. Objectives. To test the following hypotheses concerning the experimental groups: (1) They will show significantly greater achievement in reading at the end of grade 1 than will the control groups; (2) They will have significantly greater reading rates, reading vocabularies, and reading comprehension at grade 3 and grade 5 than will the control groups; (3) They, as well as the control groups, will show no significant differences in the number of pupils who evidence reading disabilities at grade 3 and grade 5; (4) They will make significantly greater gains than will the control groups in achievement in certain academic subjects at the end of grade 3 and grade 5; (5) They will evidence greater interest and enjoyment in reading at the end of grade 1, grade 3, and grade 5, as measured by the quantity of reading, than will the control groups; and (6) They will be superior to the other groups on the criterion variables mentioned above. Procedures.-The research design proposes to teach certain beginning reading activities to 50 experimental and 50 control groups totaling 3,000 kindergarten pupils. Although both groups will receive similar instructions, the experimental groups will be taught reading in kindergarten and control groups will be taught in the first grades, so that the time of beginning reading instruction will be the main variable. The method of teaching beginning reading in kindergarten and first grade uses the context and the sound of the first letter and as many others as are needed. In the first and following grades both the control and experimental groups will be subdivided into two programs. One of these will be an adjusted program designed to take the pupils as far and as fast in reading as they can soundly go. This will allow for division into four groups: an experimental group with a regular reading program in grade 1; one experimental group with an adjusted reading program in grade 1; one control group which begins a regular reading program in grade 1; and one control group with an experimental reading program beginning in grade 1 followed by an adjusted reading program. To determine the long-range effects of the study, pupils will be tested at the end of grades 1, 3, and 5. A variety of reading tests will be used and a questionnaire dealing with occupation, education, and similar matters will be administered to parents. The principal sta |