Building on previous research, this study examines the elements of the cloze context that affect performance by determining the extent to which item characteristics correlate with item difficulty. (47 references) (LB)

Results of four studies confirmed the hypothesis that three year olds would have less difficulty inferring that another person holds an odd belief about a matter of taste or value than they have in inferring that another person holds a false belief about a matter of verifiable fact. (RH)

The Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt addresses concerns related to constructivism and instructional design that were raised in an earlier issue. Relationship of ecological psychology and constructivist theory is described, constraints on constructed knowledge are discussed, and the complexity of the Jasper series of math problems that…

Examined 4-year olds' strategy development using a new kind of "same-different" judgment task that minimized memory demands. Found that children's spontaneous behavior was highly strategic, and over trials it developed differently for "same" and "different" trials. Most children who did not spontaneously use the most…

This study examined possible influences of utterance length and complexity on speech motor performance with eight 5-year-old children and eight young adults using the spatiotemporal index (STI), a measure of stability of lip movement over phrase repetitions. The STI was significantly higher in the complex sentence condition and for the younger…

Whether forward and backward serial recall performance reflects different codes, or different levels of processing complexity, was studied with 122 undergraduates. Results suggest that a phonological code was used for both forward and backward recall, and that a similar level of processing complexity was required for both. (SLD)

This study, involving 424 deaf secondary and postsecondary students, evaluated the interaction between vocabulary knowledge and syntax competence, finding a significantly greater correlation for students in the highest quartile of syntactic competence. It concludes that, unless deaf readers have achieved a reasonable level of syntactic competence,…

This article focuses on assessing the level of difficulty of search questions for Web searching, looking at variations in judgments by type of questions and the reasons underlying these judgments. Analyzes the decisions and reasoning of 54 experiences Web searchers on 16 search questions of four types, and includes the questionnaire used.…

Presents the research findings of an empirical study conducted in Finnish governmental organizations on task complexity and information-seeking activities in real-life work tasks. Focuses on the relationship between information types and source use, and the effects of task complexity on that relationship. (Author/LRW)

This study compared judgments of idiom familiarity and transparency by 50 11-year-old children and 50 16-year-old adolescents. Although the children had less familiarity and greater difficulty comprehending the idioms than did adolescents, their transparency judgments were similar. For both groups the easiest idioms were also judged as the most…

A study of 61 adults with at least a bachelor's degree and 44 high school dropouts showed that the latter perceived products with simply worded warnings as safer than those with difficult vocabulary. College-educated adults had more negative attitudes toward warnings with difficult words despite equal comprehension of both. (Contains 39…

Derrida's archive, broadly speaking, is brilliantly mad, for he digs exegetically into the most difficult textual material and combines the most unlikely texts--from Socrates to Freud, from postcards to encyclopedias, from madness(es) to the archive, from primal scenes to death. In this paper, the author would like to do a brief study of the…

An eye-movement monitoring experiment was carried out to examine the effects of the difficulty of the problem (simple versus complex problems) and the type of figure (figure 1 or figure 4) on the time course of processing categorical syllogisms. The results showed that the course of influence for these two factors is different. We found early…

To investigate students' self-monitoring practice and effects of educational level and task importance on self-monitoring, 510 students, varying in educational level from elementary through graduate school, reported the self-monitoring strategies they employed in three learning situations with different levels of task importance. The study…

Comments on analysis of attention tasks in Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) provided by Wilding (2005)points out that whereas many regulatory functions, including alertness or arousal, appear to be impaired in ADHD, demonstrating basic attention deficits in selection or orienting functions in the disorder has proven difficult. Yet…