The Structure of Intellect Learning Abilities (SOI-LA) Test was administered to 244 Navajo students (second through eighth grades) at Leupp Boarding School in northern Arizona to determine behavioral characteristics in regard to intellectual and creative ability. Comparison of SOI-LA test scores of Leupp students with norm scores revealed 54 of…

Temporal orientation may be defined as a central aspect of identity that pertains to the individual's unique interpretation of the life course. As a component of identity, temporal orientation should be affected by social contextual variables. Temporal orientation was assessed in a random sample of 94 men and women aged 24-61 years. Respondents…

A program for teaching children and adults the thinking skills most important in everyday life is described. This program, which has been tried out and evaluated in the United States, France, Germany, England, Australia, Japan, and Israel, is needed in every school and community as a "gymnasium for the mind," to help people fully use their natural…

A dominant theme in cognitive psychology is that prior knowledge in long-term memory has a strong influence on an individual's cognitive processing. Citing numerous memory studies with children, knowledge base effects are presented as part of a broader picture of memory development. Using the sort/recall procedure (asking subjects to group sets of…

Limitations of the retrieval strategy dimension of Siegler's (1982, 1984) distributions-of-associations model of young children's estimation of sums are delineated, an alternative model is described, and findings of two studies designed to test key assumptions of the models are reported. In Study 1, kindergarten children with normal IQ and no…

This paper discusses the memory abilities of children during the preschool and elementary school years, and states that successful remembering does not come naturally to children. Techniques parents and teachers can use to help children improve recall memory skills are described. Differences between recognition memory and recall memory are…

This paper describes a program for memory strengthening for older adults which combines lectures by experts with small group discussions. The importance of peer counselor involvement, particularly in focusing on the concerns of older people and the most effective ways to address these concerns is emphasized. Program objectives, session topics, and…

Research on routine problem solving (e.g. the typical "story" problem) was reviewed to facilitate the identification and dissemination of promising practices for teaching routine problem solving, and to provide suggestions and directions for further research in the area. Promising teaching practices which were identified included giving attention…

Problems related to the structure of the mental lexicon are considered. The single access assumption, the passive memory assumption, and the heterogeneous memory assumption are rejected in favor of the theory which assumes several active memories, each able to store expression based on only one homogenous set of abstract primitives. One lexicon…

Seventy-four high school seniors participated in a study that examined the construct validity of vocabulary tests and the nature of verbal ability by integrating findings and theories of cognitive psychology with those of differential psychology. The subjects completed three kinds of measurement instruments: (1) an experimental faceted vocabulary…

An information processing approach was applied to the development and validation of a test battery intended for personnel selection, classification, and guidance; and design of training programs. The approach specifies that tests should measure specific cognitive processes and basic abilities, rather than prior experience. Tests should be short,…

The main purpose of this study was to address this question: When preschool children are exposed to novel objects, will their tactual and verbal information-seeking about these objects and the amount of information they remember about these same objects be influenced by whether an adult labels them as things "for girls" or "for…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 24 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: the influence of additional supportive context upon the reader's ability to identify the main idea of a paragraph; effects of metaphors and paraphrases as…

Thirteen manuscripts and extended reports on the nature of speech, instrumentation for its investigation, and practical applications of research are presented in this status report on speech research for the period of July-December 1979. The topics dealt with include speech perception, children's memory for sentences and word strings in relation…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 23 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) the effects on reading comprehension of a number of reader-related factors, including lookback during studying, oral versus silent reading modes, reading…