Individualized Instruction: Its Effects upon Achievement and Interest in Beginning College Spanish

Progress in Language Classroom Research: Evidence from The Modern Language Journal, 1916‐2000

“…In addition, they outlined in much greater detail than previous classroom research the reliabilities of their extensive test measures, and they were the first explicitly to employ analysis of covariance to adjust for initial differences-although researchers from the beginning of the Journal's publication had shown concern and attempts to adjust for lack of equivalence between treatment groups. Also to the credit of Clark and Clark and of Blickenstaff and Woerdehoff, they sampled student attitudes toward the instructional variables, a practice that up to that time had been neglected in classroom studies (sam-pling of student attitudes toward instruction was undertaken more extensively in the 1970s and afterwards, as in Moody, 1976, a correlational study only; Benmaman, Moore, Morgan, & Rowe, 1982;Joiner, 1977;Nieman & Smith, 1978;Schulz, 1977;and Swaffar & Woodruff's 1978 review of several correlational studies at the University of Texas).…”

Individualized Instruction: Its Effects upon Achievement and Interest in Beginning College Spanish

“…During the 1973 -74 academic year, the achievement and interest-motivation of students in the first semester of Paced Spanish were compared with those of similar students in the conventional beginning curriculum (Nieman, 1976). Specifically, the purpose of the investigation was to assess: 1) achievement in basic language skills, 2) interaction of teaching strategy with prior study of Spanish, language aptitude, interest-motivation, and general scholastic aptitude, and 3) changes over the semester in the student's affective orientation.…”

Learner Variables and Student Performance in Second-Language Learning

“…In all, Mackey (1967) has identified some fifteen methods by which foreign languages are taught. It is significant that although different investigations report conflicting results in terms of which strategy is most effective, there seems to be a general trend indicating that method is related to student achievement, particularly in short term studies (Jarvis and Hatfield, 1971;Savignon, 1972;Asher, 1974;Nieman, 1976). Equally important is the fact that some of the more extensive studies (Scherer and Wertheimer, 1964;P.…”