Suggests that instructional theory is possible, but it should concern itself only with narrowly circumscribed local instructional situations, relatively small chunks of curriculum for relatively small segments of the educational population. (Author/AM)

The authors argue that our schools fail to respond to the uniqueness of the human brain, its differential characteristics and its serious under-utilization. (Editor)

To evaluate individual differences in children's propensity to demonstrate cognitive synthesis, six-year-olds were asked to demonstrate the meaning of various sentences constructed of logographs, which were arranged in either a meaningful or scrambled order. Overall, synthesizers had a larger attentional reserve, or M-capacity, than…

Presents results from a study that used an intensive design approach to investigate cognitive aspects of fluent reading. Cites data from the study to illustrate the advantages of the methodology for monitoring intrasubject variability in text processing. (FL)

Children who recognize a compensatory relationship between height-width dimensions are more susceptible to conservation training than children who do not recognize this relationship. (Authors)

Vocational Preference Inventory (VPI) and other instruments administered to 365 students, both undecided and in various interest fields, revealed several differences in cognitive style. No differences regarding cognitive style variations and VPI high-point codes or ease of vocational selection were observed. (Author/CJ)

Describes the development of the Reasons for Living Inventory (RFL), an instrument to measure beliefs potentially important as reasons for not committing suicide. Factor analyses indicated six primary reasons for living. The RFL was given to Seattle shoppers (N=197) and psychiatric inpatients (N=195) and differentiated suicidal from nonsuicidal…

Subjects scaled 48 positive and 32 negative assertion vignettes according to similarity of difficulty to determine how people cognitively present complex social situations. Analyses indicated each dimension could be described according to major component(s) that contributed to it and dimensions varied in importance as a function of assertion…

The research review revealed that neither deception nor gullibility affects individual differences in acceptance, that subjects accurately recognize the triviality and actual accuracy of Barnum feedback, and that bogus feedback may persuade subjects to alter their self-evaluations slightly. The acceptance phenomenon manifests subjects' rationality…

Presents a proposed unifying relationship between instructional methods and cognitive operations, and argues that it is the location of the processing of the learning task that defines the function, type, and extent of the instructional method required. More than 50 references are listed. (MER)