The problem of the study was to determine the implications for the collegiate secretarial curriculum based on the need for and use of shorthand by secretaries employed by large businesses in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The purposes of the study were to determine if colleges are justified in offering manual shorthand within their curriculum with the rapid growth of automation in the business world today. It was also the purpose of the study to determine if there was a demand for secretaries with the skill of manual shorthand in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Shorthand was found to be important for recording telephone messages, notes, and instructions, as indicated by the majority of the secretaries.

The problem with which this investigation is concerned is that students of unequal writing ability are frequently placed in the same beginning media writing classes in college journalism. It is difficult for a teacher to be effective when the ability of the students ranges from those who cannot write clear complete sentences to others whose work already appears in newspapers and magazines. The purpose of this study is to determine whether students who are ability grouped into slow—average and advanced groups do the same, better, or worse than heterogeneously grouped students. In the spring semester of 1987, students in Journalism 1345, Media Writing laboratory, at the University of Texas at Arlington, were given a pretest to determine how well they wrote a simple news story and a simple feature story. On the basis of that test, which was graded by three raters, the students were placed in two separate ability groups in three classes. The fourth class contained students with heterogeneous abilities who were not placed in groups. At the end of the semester a posttest was given in news and feature writing. A two-way analysis of variance was used to analyze the posttest scores of sixty-seven students. There was …

This investigation compares the effectiveness of two methods of teaching production work in beginning typewriting. One method is defined as the traditional approach, which adheres to suggestions and materials for teaching found in current typewriting textbooks. Students are paced, drilled, and timed on straight copy to build speed and accuracy, but not on production work; they usually type from perfectly arranged copy; and they circle their errors for at least half the course. The other method, developed at North Texas State University by Payne and Anderson, is defined as the teacher-directed approach. Students are intensively paced, drilled, and timed by the teacher on short, simple jobs or parts of jobs; they usually type from unarranged copy; they learn to erase errors on production work during the first production unit; and they are evaluated on the basis of the number of mailable items produced during a specific time period.