Reported is a study of the activities and performance of institutional review boards to protect human research subjects. Institutional review boards had some direct impact on half of the proposals reviewed. The data raised questions about the effectiveness of some review board action. (Author/MP)

Presents four letters pointing out design difficulties in the experiments of Morrison, Giordani, and Nagy in their investigation of reading disabilities, memory, and perception. (SL)

Surveys 5,000 years of artworks, encompassing 1,180 scorable instances of unimanual tool or weapon usage. No systematic trends in hand usage were revealed. Right hand use averaged 93 percent of all cases regardless of which historical era or geographic region was assessed. (SL)

Examines issues associated with the design of and statistical inferences from embedded experiments which vary the questionnaire content into sample surveys of broad populations. Provides an example of context effects in attitude surveys, a summary, and conclusions. (RT)

Reviews recent research in the treatment and cause of hyperactivity in children. (SL)

Reports that left-handed subjects, particularly those with mixed hand preference, significantly out performed right-handed subjects in a pitch recognition task. (SL)

Reports the use of Methylphenidate (Ritalin) as a treatment for hyperkinetic children shows a peak enhancement of learning at a dose of 0.3 milligrams per hilogram of body weight and a peak enhancement of behavior at a dose of 1.0 milligrams per kilogram. (SL)

Reports bita-Adrenergic antagonists injected into rats trained in a passive avoidance task produced time-dependent and dose-dependent decreases in retention of the task. Results were stereospecific and reversed by norepinephrine. (SL)

Describes the main features of the legislation establishing the National Institute of Education, and speculates on the likely impact on education of the research and development activities initiated and supported by the Institute when funded. (AL)

Hair samples from 31 learning disabled and 22 normal children were analyzed. Significant group differences were determined and a discriminant function was computed which separated the groups with 98 percent accuracy. Elevated lead and cadmium content in the learning disabled group is viewed as being of particular importance. (Author/SL)

Proposes a policy framework for analyzing educational research and development supported by the federal government. Five primary elements of the framework are given for analyzing, developing, and implementing research policies for education. (JM)

Describes how the statistical technique of meta-analysis can be used to help resolve conflicting studies in social sciences. (ZWH)

Reports results of an experiment involving a hydranencephalic infant lacking cerebral hemispheres and a normal twin in testing for associative learning. Cardiac orienting responses to stimulus omission indicated that learning had taken place in both infants. (CS)

Investigated the relationship between hand writing posture and cerebral dominance of 48 left handed writers and 25 right handed writers. Determined that cerebral dominance is related to handedness and to whether or not the writing hand posture is normal or inverted. (SL)

Presents views of the opponents and supporters of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Mathematics Institute. (HM)