Sample A: Cover Page of Thesis, Project, or Dissertation Proposal

another research project. Children included in these training videotapes were of
approximately the same age and socio-economic status as the children in the current
study. This training included coding approximately 20 video-taped segments of a typical
preschool day for all of Sroufe et al.‘s (1984) original MPAC categories. For each
category, all correlations of observations between the lead researcher and a master coder
ranged from .34 (p = .06) to .89 (ps < .05, .01, and .001) except for the Peer Skill
category (r = .09, ns; see Table 13). Since this initial training, the lead researcher
collected MPAC data for two large-scale research projects and trained graduate and
undergraduate research assistants on the measure.
For TOPEL Definitional Vocabulary, AKT, and MPAC data collection purposes,
all researchers assessed children successively according to participant identification
assignments (i.e., data collection began with the smallest identification number and ended
with the highest identification number). For days on which a child was absent or
unavailable due to Head Start service participation (e.g., speech therapy), researchers
continued collecting data successively with the next available child. On the following
data collection day, researchers first collected data from previously unavailable children
and then continue to successively collect data according to participant identification
assignments where he or she finished the previous day. Researchers assessing children‘s
literacy skills and emotion knowledge alternated administrations of the Definitional
Vocabulary subtest and AKT with each child assessed, and they administered only one
assessment per child per day. The lead researcher concurrently conducted MPAC
observations according to these same guidelines. When every child was assessed once,
72