Objective: To examine cognitive and psychosocial factors associated with high school dropout in urban adolescents with and without childhood ADHD. Method: In a longitudinal study, 49 adolescents/young adults with childhood ADHD and 44 controls who either dropped out or graduated from high school are included. Risk factors examined as potential…

This paper reports a study designed to increase the moral reasoning and multicultural competence of White students in a counselling internship. An intervention was conducted to determine the effectiveness of using a deliberate psychological education (DPE) approach that incorporated issues of cultural competence, oppression and diversity. This…

Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development and David Ausubel's assimilation theory of learning are explicated and selected research involving both theories is reviewed in this paper. The two theories are compared on selected dimensions to demonstrate that they are compatible and that, in conjunction with one another, they form a strong…

Piaget's conception of cognitive development as the development of a set of skills resulting from interaction with the environment has had a great effect on contemporary educational theory and spurred the Educational Testing Service (ETS) to develop a set of written exercises based on this concept. Piaget's emphasis, however, was on concrete…

Children between the ages of six and 11 were asked to recall personal experiences of pity, anger, and guilt and to rate the cause of each emotion on degree of controllability. Results were interpreted as evidence that guilt in young children may be a qualitatively different emotion because of its closer link to outcome than to perceived…

Investigates developmental change in the use of strategies to eliminate interference from irrelevant information in memory. Two developmental transitions were found: (1) from ineffective to effective selective remembering (between ages 7 and 11), and (2) from the use of a selective retrieval strategy to a more sophisticated rehearsal strategy…

Gross comparisons (easiest) were solvable by all; intensive comparisons (medium difficulty) were inversely related to IQ, and extensive comparisons (hardest) were easiest for low IQ, low M.A. and high IQ, high M.A. retardates. (MH)

Disadvantaged preschool children, although less efficient in intellectual performance than advantaged children, were not less likely to inhibit motor responses upon verbal request or less curious. (MH)

Two studies examined whether 4-year-olds' difficulty using relational information in spatial tasks was due, in part, to their inability to deal with situations where both objective and egocentric cues were available and pointed to different responses. Findings indicated that the presence of conflict significantly affected children's performance in…

Used point-light displays (lights corresponding to the joints of the human body) to examine 3-year-olds' understanding of verbs. Found that children could extend familiar motion verbs (walking, dancing) to videotaped point-light actions shown in an intermodal preferential looking paradigm. Children watched the action matching the requested verb…

Tested 13-, 16-, and 20-month olds' and 24- and 28-month olds' categorization of global- and basic-level object sets composed of prototypical and nonprototypical exemplars. Findings offer new information on the effects of prototypicality and on the process of differentiation of early global categories into more specific basic-level ones. (DR)

The arbitrary nature of growth trends in cognitive variables is illustrated. Two metrics, grade equivalent and item-response theory representations, both of which preserve the order of performance levels in test data, produced different pictures of cognitive growth, and differences were seen to arise from differences in the scaling models. (SLD)

Four experiments investigated 3-year-olds' understanding of the differential importance of shape for categorizing solid objects. Found that they categorized rigid and deformable objects differently in a non-naming task and knew that material was important for deformable items and shape for rigid items. In two naming tasks, they generalized names…

This study investigated how 4- to 7-year-old children's second-order belief attribution might be facilitated by either reducing information processing or varying the sequence of task questions. In Experiment 1, compared with Perner and Wimmer's (1985) original second-order false-belief task, a new task with reduced information-processing demands…