Questions concerning the ontogeny of the planning process and its role in the regulation of behavior have been markedly absent from the literature. The present study examines the planning done during solitary play by middle-class children from four public nursery schools in Athens, Greece. One hundred preschool children in five age groups (42, 48,…

This study replicates Siltanen's (1986) investigation of four developmental stages of metaphor comprehension and tests the effects of two levels of context on children's ability to comprehend metaphors. A total of 159 subjects ranging in age from 6 through 12 years were asked to provide an open-ended response to 16 test metaphors which varied in…

Concern has been expressed over the item response theory (IRT) assumption that a person's ability can be estimated in a unidimensional latent space. To examine whether or not the response to an item requires only a single latent ability, unidimensional ability estimates were compared for data generated from the multidimensional item response…

An experimental study investigating the interaction of linguistic complexity and performance in child language acquisition tests the hypothesis that children learning a first language acquire relatively complex sentences somewhat later than less complex sentences. In one of three tests, the subjects, 44 children aged 3.6 to 6 years, were presented…

Students' evaluations of a lesson were made on the same videotaped lesson after students were informed that the lesson was difficult or that it was easy, and after they were given a hard or easy content test. A two-way factorial design was employed with 92 undergraduate students, who were randomly assigned to conditions. After all students…

Despite advances made by women, male professionals still outperform and outearn women professionals. Various explanations have been put forth, including gender discrimination, biological and/or socialization differences between the sexes and differential demands of parenthood. However, none of these explanations seems to account for the magnitude…

Learnability theory involves the construction of formal mathematical proofs whose goal is to demonstrate how the child can successfully induce a mature grammar. An empirically adequate learnability proof constitutes a detailed hypothesis concerning the boundary conditions within which acquisition proceeds and can provide a general framework for…

Preparation of this paper supported by U.S. Public Health Grant HD-0890, a grant from the Carenegie Corporation, and by U.S. Public Health Grant HD-2680.

A method of investigating for possible bias in test items is proposed that uses analysis of variance for item data based on groups that have been selected to have identical test score distributions. The item data used are arcsin transformations of item difficulties. The methodological procedure has the following advantages: (1) The arcsin…

This paper reviews research on pictorial stimulus complexity in instructional materials, examining still iconic visuals in particular. Five phases are proposed to assist in the integration of this research for generating useful hypotheses: (1) establishment of methodological and conceptual criteria; (2) collection of relevant literature; (3)…

This study was designed to examine the processes underlying developmental changes in children's (1) use of combinatorial strategy, and (2) comprehension of conjunctive and disjunctive propositional relationships. A total of 108 children from third, sixth and eighth grades participated in this study. Each child was administered three tasks…

Traditionally, comparable content-area forms and levels of a multi-level, multi-form achievement test series have been equated using the equipercentile method. There is some evidence to indicate, however, that better procedures are needed. A linking procedure is being used to equate simultaneously 40 different test forms of an achievement test:…

Social facilitation as a self-presentational display, and social performance impairment attributable to perceived public failure, are examined in a study of context effects in verbal learning. Female undergraduates (N=72) served as subjects with one male who served as an "audience." Performance data indicate that, consistent with the present…

Forty adults served as subjects in a study of the comprehensibility of instructions conditioned by multicategory compounds, such as "If you are male, or both married and not employed, go to question 3." The stimulus materials were 96 sentence frames of the form, "If you are X, press (button) Y," in which "X" was…