A Self-Concept Scale for Adolescents based on Havighurst's Developmental Tasks for Youth was constructed to reflect the adolescents' perceptions of their ability to achieve these tasks in relation to personal abilities, the abilities of others, and the criteria for successful task completion. A validity and reliability study showed the scale to be…

This paper reports on the development and validation of an instrument for recording haptic exploratory behavior through detailed examination of exploratory search strategies of young children. Individual differences within age level were investigated, as well as the extent to which information processing capabilities for haptic perception are…

This paper discusses research exploring the performance factors involved in studies which test for formal operations. It is suggested that several previous studies dealing with formal operations confound performance and competence in determining the extent of subjects' formal operations schemata. Factors which might account for performance…

Two experiments comprised this study comparing the ability of children from ages 4 to 12 years to discriminate the order in which items from a previously presented sequence of stimuli had been presented. The hypotheses were that the discrimination of recency (DR) improves with age, that broader separations of test items are easier to discriminate…

Four experiments examined the spelling capability of students in grades 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, and college. Results suggested that reading unit size increases with age and reading ability. Younger children, like adults, unitize common words, and unitization of less common words increases as word configurations become more familiar. (RWB)

This study examined individual differences in young children's understanding of emotion and potential correlates in the domain of family experiences. Participating in the study were 49 children, ages 40 to 75 months from a predominately white, middle to upper class sample. Self-report questionnaires concerning the expression of emotion, management…

Investigated the relationship of two memory components involved in the retrieval of information from long-term memory--one process-oriented and one structure-oriented-- to variability associated with age and ability differences. Striking developmental differences obtained for retrieval efficiency were highly related to scores on tests of ability,…

Explored sex differences in adolescent preference for older versus younger mates. Found that teenage males were willing to date females of a wide age range, whereas teenage females prefer dating males from their own age to several years older. Data suggested viewing development of sex differences in dating partner preference from the perspective…

Whether tasks requiring the use of explicit, rather than implicit, forms of memory are sensitive to developmental and individual differences was studied using 15 non-disabled and 15 disabled third graders and 15 non-disabled and 15 disabled sixth graders. Learning disability status and grade level factors significantly affected memory performance.…

Examined the impact of 2 environmental factors--social class and family risk levels--and 2 biological factors--intraventricular hemorrhage (IVH) and medical risk--on the cognitive and motor development of 175 preterm infants. Family risk, early medical risk, and the interaction of family risk and IVH were found to be significant predictors of…

Used the Adolescent Prosocial Behavior Inventory to explore sixth, eighth, and tenth graders' prosocial behavior toward parents as an embedded aspect of parent/adolescent relationships. Found that mothers received more prosocial behavior than did fathers. Daughters acted more prosocially than sons. Attachment had a direct and an indirect effect…

Three experiments investigated whether theory-of-mind deficits and weak central coherence might be functionally related. Found that theory-of-mind performance was inversely related to a measure of central coherence bias in the general population. Poor theory-of-mind performance was linked to weak central coherence among children with typical…

Examined relations between phonological processing and emerging individual differences in math computation skills. Found that phonological memory, access rate to phonological codes in memory, and phonological awareness were uniquely associated with growth in number of computation procedures mastered from 92.5 to 134.8 months. Phonological…

Graduate students differ in their conceptualizations of mentoring. This study examined the relationship between students' demographic and academic characteristics (age, gender, citizenship, academic discipline, and stage of persistence) and their preferences for three styles of mentoring assessed by the Ideal Mentor Scale (IMS): Integrity,…

The impact of parents as socialization agents for the gender development of their children is controversial in the literature. This study tested the assumption that parental socialization influences found to be of importance for one kind of variation in gender development are not necessarily the same as those that are of relevance to explain…