Browsing by Author "Newman, Katherine K."
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Item A content analysis of fourteen Nigerian young adult novels(1981) Osa, Osayimwense; Abrahamson, Richard F.; Verner, Zenobia B.; Mountain, Lee H.; Newman, Katherine K.; Indakwa, JohnPurpose of the Study. The purpose of this study was, in essence, to come out with a composite picture of the Nigerian young adult novel. This goal was achieved through an in depth content analysis of fourteen Nigerian junior novels. Findings of the Study. Twelve content questions were posited to be looked into in the novels. It was found that the Nigerian junior novel, in the main, has a didactical bent because it hits at the core of traditional African education-character development. It also mirrors developmental tasks of Nigerian youth: discovering his sex role, developing new relationships with people his own age, achieving an easy relationship with members of the opposite sex, accepting his physical body, changing his relationship with his parents, working for pay, finding a vocation, becoming aware of his value patterns, and learning to accept the finality of death. Each of the fourteen novels deals with one or more of the aforementioned tasks. All the fourteen Nigerian young adult novels have a common locale-Nigeria. They deal with contemporary issues and problems primarily rooted in the Nigerian adolescent world. There seems to be some rigidity in technique. This junior novel is generally shorter than the adult novel and the third person point of view narration features prominently and there is little, if any, switching of that viewpoint. Only Ekwensi's Juju Rock is narrated from the first person point of view in this study. While some of the novels like The Drummer Boy and Adewoye's The Betrayer are bluntly didactic, some, like Oguntoye's Too Cold for Comfort and Areo's The Hopeful Lovers, have enough indications to make the reader conclude that they are didactic. Nigerian junior novels depict action mainly on a physical plane rather than emphasizing the psychological state of a character. Such a stance partly causes the paper thin nature of the adolescent and adult characters in the novel instead of fiull roundedness of character. The action in all the novels for this study progresses in a chronological manner rather than through flashbacks or views of events yet to happen. The plot is of both character and incident. The virtual absence of complex sentences, literary allusions, or complex literary symbolism in these novels makes the style, in general, quite simple and easy to read for the Nigerian high school student. Conclusions. This dissertation, which is the first extensive and sustained scholarly work on the Nigerian junior novel, comes out with a composite picture of what the contemporary Nigerian junior novel is. The dissertation is, at best, a major stepping stone on a scholarly path that critically examines the new phenomenon of young adult books in Nigeria. Like the junior novel in the United States, the forte of the Nigerian junior novel is in the area of personal and family problems. The major interest in these novels is in the content. Local and pedagogical in content and in orientation, the Nigerian junior novel touches the lives of Nigerian youths. It differs from contemporary American junior novels in its hardline moral stance. It essentially presents literature as a vision of life which the adolescent can readily understand, and not a complex mass of information experientially irrelevant to Nigerian youths. The novels make literature meaningful, at least to the Nigerian adolescent, by making contact with cultural values, social functions, and individual lives. To do less makes literature irrelevant in a Nigeria that cannot afford any more irrelevancies.Item A history of the National Association of Jazz Educators and a description of its role in American music education, 1968-1978(1979) Herfort, David Allan; Miller, Samuel D.; Briggs, Robert L.; Miller, Albert H.; Newman, Katherine K.Beginning in the late fifties, a few music educators began to clamor for a greater infusion of jazz and popular music into the curriculum of American education. Their rationale was based on the assumption that since jazz/popular music was an integral part of American culture, it was educationally valid for students at all grade levels. By the middle sixties, informal discussions were being held concerning the formation of an organization of jazz and popular music educators. The following individuals were actively involved in these early planning sessions: Matthew Betton, Clement DeRosa, Morris Hall, Donald Joseph, Stan Kenton, William Lee, John Roberts, and Jack Wheaton. Following the Tanglewood Symposium of mid-1967, the afore-mentioned group met in Chicago, Illinois with Louis Wersen, then president of the Music Educators National Conference. MENC was the national representative of 64,000 American music educators and Wersen invited the fledgling group of jazz/popular music educators to join the National Conference. On March 19, 1968 in Seattle, Washington, the newly-created National Association of Jazz Educators presented its Constitution and Bylaws to the MENC Executive Board and was promptly accepted as a member of the parent organization. Since its formation, NAJE has grown to represent 4,400 jazz and popular music educators in a range of instructional levels from kindergarten through college. As a result, jazz and popular music have achieved an academic respectability and a gradually increasing acceptance into the mainstream of American music education. This study provides a history of the National Association of Jazz Educators (1968-1978); a description of NAJE1s role in American music education; and a description and summarization of NAJE's progress toward the attainment of its stated goals and objectives. Since the founding of the association, its role in American music education has been to act as a catalyst for the promotion of jazz and popular music curricula in schools and colleges. The educational activities of NAJE have been most visible in four areas: a majority of NAJE officials at the state, regional, and national levels have been active as jazz educators and/or administrators in elementary, secondary, and higher education; the total number of American institutions of higher learning which offer jazz and popular music curricula grew from 135 in 1969 to 440 in 1974; the growth of America's student jazz ensembles increased from 15,000 in 1970 to over 30,000 in 1978; and annual big-band jazz festivals for high school and college musicians expanded from 175 in 1973 to 15,000 in 1978. The sevenfold purpose of NAJE1 has come increasingly closer to attainment in the late seventies because of two primary factors: the gradual growth in the total of specific areas of jazz/popular music education which were aided by NAJE and the major educational projects of the association during its first five presidencies. Due to the recency of these NAJE administrations, it is premature to accurately assess their educational endeavors. The primary purpose of NAJE ostensibly has been to promote the understanding, appreciation, and performance of jazz and popular music. Since its 1973 change in organizational status with MENC, however, NAJE has become a de facto jazz educators association and has overemphasized performing curricula such as large jazz ensembles. On the other hand, MENC has continued to promote all styles of both jazz and popular music through performing and nonperforming curricula. It is recommended that NAJE strike the term "popular music" from its Constitution and continue its proven effective role as leader of jazz education in America. In addition, it is recommended that NAJE should stress the development of small ensemble and improvisational techniques, as well as nonperforming jazz curricula.Item Activation and update across the adult life span(1981) Thronesbery, Carroll; Lachman, Roy; Lachman, Janet L.; Newman, Katherine K.; Howard, George S.In the present study activation and update, two processes which serve to increase memory efficiency, were measured for young and old adults. For older people, complaints about the ability to retrieve information from one's knowledge about the world are common. Yet empirical research provides conflicting evidence concerning whether long term memory retrieval declines in effectiveness with age. A possible explanation of the inconsistent findings is inefficient (time-consuming) retrieval. Inefficient retrieval could easily oe deleterious to performance on some retrieval tasks (especially timed ones), and it could interfere with one's day-to-day memory functions enough to give rise to complaints. Two memory efficiency processes were examined in the present study, activation, and update. Both processes speed the retrieval of selected concepts from semantic memory (one's knowledge store). Activation has short-lived effects which spread to concepts semantically related to concepts currently being processed. Activation improves memory retrieval efficiency by "anticipating" what informa tion in semantic memory will be needed in the very near future (that information which is semantically related to ongoing mental events) and temporarily speeding the retrieval of that information. Update, on the other hand, has relatively permanent effects. Although update is a relatively new object of investigationz it appears that upon each occasion a word or concept is processed, that word or concept is subsequently somewhat faster to retrieve. As a result the words and concepts which a person uses most frequently receive the most update (speed-ups) and are faster to retrieve. Thus, in theory, update makes frequently used concepts faster to retrieve than infrequently used concepts, thereby improving the efficiency of retrieval from semantic memory. In the present study, world-knowledge questions were presented visually. Response times were measured from the onset of the question to the subject's spoken answer. Verification questions (e.g. "Do wild kangaroos live in Australia?") were primed by previously presented, semantically related verification questions (e.g.z "Do wild koala bears live in Australia?"). Priming effects were measured after a short delay (up to 30 seconds, to measure activation effects) and after a long delay (about 30 minutes, to measure update effects). In this manner, activation effects (short delay) and uodate effects (long delay) were measured for twelve young (ages 22-29) and twelve old subjects (age 60 and above). In order to ensure comparability of young and old subjects, both groups were selected from Houston area public school teachers. Although the general response latencies were slower for older subjects than for younger ones, activation and update effects were nearly identical for the two age groups. Thus, two information processing mechanisms which are critical to efficient memory retrieval appear not to decline with age. Hopefully, as more studies like the present study are reported, negative stereotypes of the aging process will be weakened.Item Industry education and training : records management(1981) Bennick, Ann; Dalton, Marie; Miller, Albert H.; Newman, Katherine K.; O'Neil, Sharon L.With the new and expanding technological advances in information processing as reported in the literature, a myriad of problems have also evolved--causal factors in the emergence of the field and profession of records management. The literature presents very little information on how these new professionals, records managers, their workers or their clientele are educated or trained. The purpose of this study was to provide information regarding the status of records management education and the status of records management training in industry (including business, government, institutions, and all other organizations). In addition, the study was designed to determine the records manager's perception of the ideal records management education and training program. Specific research questions of the study are as follows: 1) What work groups are currently being educated in records management education/training programs and what work groups are currently being trained in records management education/training programs? 2) What formats/methods are being used to educate and train these work groups? 3) What is the records manager's perception of the ideal records management education/training program? What work groups should be educated and what work groups should be trained in this ideal program? What formats/methods should be used in this ideal program? A distinction was made between education (concepts) and training (tasks) in the study. [...]Item Patterns of motion and soundpower : their significance to the school marching band(1981) Arnold, Edwin Paul, 1945-; Miller, Samuel D.; Brand, Manny; Briggs, Robert L.; Newman, Katherine K."Patterns of Motion" is a concept of marching band performance featuring the evolution of designs based upon a squad concept with maneuvers presented in a systematic manner for ease of teaching to various size marching bands. "Soundpower" is a specific style of music scoring that achieves a maximum projection of sound and utilizes the instrumentation of a specific band to greatest efficiency. "Patterns of Motion" and "Soundpower" compliment each other when used conjunctly as an efficient method of teaching the marching band. The purpose of this study is to identify the significant influence and contribution "Patterns of Motion" and "Soundpower" have had upon the evolution of the marching band. A review of the literature reveals no documented research regarding the significance of these specific concepts. In view of this, there is an apparent void in the development of an historical and descriptive base from which experimental, scientific, and music analysis research may evolve. This study examines the concepts of "Patterns of Motion" and "Soundpower" and historically and descriptively identifies their contributions and influence on the marching band in todayts educational programs. Specifically, the study (1) presents an historical and descriptive account of the development of "Patterns of Motion" and compares this concept to other styles of teaching marching maneuvers; (2) analyzes basic scoring techniques in selected scores of "Soundpower" arrangements with attention given to comparative scoring techniques, revised instrumentation; and new instruments; (3) discusses the influence of "Patterns of Motion" on teaching and learning in public school instrumental programs; (U) provides a statement of educational needs that inspired William Moffit to create these concepts; and (5) suggests trends for the future of marching bands based on "Patterns of Motion" and "Soundpower" concepts. The study concludes that "Patterns of Motion" and "Soundpower" have been considered the first complete system of materials made commercially available as a teaching device for the marching band. These concepts have influenced music scoring techniques, marching band teaching procedures, and the development of new musical instruments. The study provides a base to further pursue historical studies concerning the marching band movement, the marching bands' relationship to other areas of music education and a deeper insight into the educational significance of these concepts.Item Update versus activation of semantic memory(1980) Thronesbery, Carroll; Lachman, Roy; Lachman, Janet L.; Newman, Katherine K.Two processes were studied which can alter the speed with which a concept is retrieved from semantic memory: activation and update. Activation has short-lived effects which spread to semantically related concepts. Update has relatively permanent effects, and it would seem that update cannot spread nearly as much as activation. Data from previous studies suggest that a clear separation of the durations of activation and update is possible. The present study was designed to investigate whether activation and update are two separate and distinct processes by determining if their magnitudes can be independently manipulated. In the present study, world-knowledge questions were presented visually. Response time was measured from the onset of the visual question to the subject's spoken answer. The answer-production task required the subject to recall an answer, e.g., "Where do wild kangaroos live?" The verification task required a "yes" or "no" answer, e.g., "Do wild kangaroos live in Australia?" By hypothesis, a verification task and semantically related primes would result in strong activation and weak update, whereas an answer-production task and identical primes would result in strong update. Experiment 1 partially supported these hypotheses by indicating that the answer-production task and identical primes produce a strong update effect. However, a strong update effect was also found for the verification task and for semantically related primes. In Experiment 2, all available questions were used to investigate the critical combination of the verification task with semantically related primes. With the power thus increased, semantically primed verification questions showed strong activation and weak update. This outcome supports the conclusion that activation and update are separate processes, in that their magnitudes can be manipulated independently.