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THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Friday, October 18, 1968
KU prof develops new teaching method
A KU professor thinks he has found a way to teach skills in English composition by using a multiple choice questionnaire.
Oscar M. Haugh, professor of education and Dale P. Scannell, formerly of KU and now director of the evaluation and examination services at the University of Iowa, designed a special course to teach the basic skills of composition without actually resorting to the task of grading written material.
Air Force ROTC to start course in officer training
Air Force ROTC is accepting applications for their two-year professional officer course.
Capt. Lucian A, Siepielski said the department will consider all interested applicants, but the greatest need is for pilots and navigators.
The war in Vietnam has prompted the recruiting drive for pilots, but because the Air Force already has a four-year program from which they select officers, selections for the two-year program will be highly competitive, Siepielski said.
The basic requirements of the program are that the applicant have two academic years remaining at either the undergraduate or graduate level and a grade point average of at least 1.5.
The applicants will be further screened by a physical examination, the Air Force Officers Qualification Test and an interview by a board of Air Force officers.
Central Plains is symposium topic
The University of Kansas will host the Symposium on the Pleistocene and Recent Environments of the Central Plains Friday and Saturday Oct. 25 and 26.
The symposium is the idea of Wakefield Dort Jr., KU associate professor of geology, and J. Knox Jones, professor of zoology and curator of the Natural History Museum.
The purpose of the symposium is to focus attention on the importance of the Central Plains since the Pleistocene age and to explore the possibilities of future study.
Waldo Wedel of the Smithsonian Institute will be one of the principal speakers.
Dort said about 300 persons from the U.S., Canada, Mexico and South America are expected to attend the symposium.
Willingham to write for encyclopedia
Dr. John R. Willingham, director of freshman-sophomore English courses, has been commissioned to write the section of literary criticism for the new addition of Colliers Encyclopedia.
Dr. Jean E. Gagen, also a professor of English, is the author of the article, "Hector's Honor," in the Shakespeare Quarterly.
Untiring Students
BRESSANONE, Italy (UPI)
—Mrs. Berta Messerer, 68-year-old widow, is at it again.
She is working at the University of Padova on her 10th degree. Among degrees she already holds are medicine, law, social science, history and political science.
Mrs. Messerer, who began studying after World War II when her husband died in a Nazi concentration camp, can read, write or speak 24 languages. "I have nothing else to do but study," she said. "I spend 12 hours a day studying."
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The Educational Resources Information Center on the Teaching of English, located at Champaign, Ill., called the study a great contribution to education and will reproduce it on microfilm to make it available nationally.
Haugh said the course is similar to a multiple choice quiz, in that the student is given several sentences or paragraphs and
must decide which is the most expressive or correct. The course begins with what Haugh termed "simple skills" like punctuation, and progresses to more difficult areas like the organization and structuring of ideas.
The course was tested in English classes in four Kansas City, Mo., and three Topeka high schools. In each school, the students were divided into experimental and control groups, given a pre-test to evaluate their abilities and stratified to insure the results indicated the worth of the test and not the ability of the student.
Haugh stressed that during the
study, the experimental group wrote only one complete theme, compared to the theme-a-week format of the control group. He did admit that an earlier study in this area had indicated that skills in writing do not seem highly correlated to the number of themes the student writes.
After the 10-week course, the students were again tested and although the students of the regularly-taught control classes scored slightly higher on a standardized test on composition, the experimental group wrote slightly better themes.
Haugh said the differences between the two groups' scores
were not large enough to be considered significant, so the results were inconclusive. He added that the short period of time allowed for the study handicapped its effectiveness.
Although the study offered no permanent proof, its worth lay in the fact it indicated a teacher need not spend great amounts of time grading themes if similar skills can be taught by the multiple choice method, Haugh said.
"Even though the experimental group did not improve much more than the control group, at least they did not fall behind," said Haugh.
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