Analysis of young children's comprehension of common idioms revealed a significant linear trend for children to make more literal responses with increasing age. Children did not find the story contexts helpful in interpreting the idioms. A range of comprehension scores was found among the individual idioms, but semantic transparency was not…

Students (n=150) ages 11, 14, and 17 were asked to explain the meanings of 24 different idiomatic expressions. Performance on the task gradually improved as subject age increased. High-familiarity idioms were easier to explain than moderate-familiarity or low-familiarity expressions. Easier idioms tended to be more transparent. (Author/JDD)

This article examines the relationship of cognitive processing and creativity and argues that educational interventions contribute to the development of creative thinking skills when they provide requisite knowledge structures and stress controlled application of these processes in solving progressively more complex problems. (DB)

This study compared 24 adult stutterers and 24 nonstutterers for response initiation and completion times on manual task conditions varying as to decision complexity. It was concluded that response planning and organization deficits in stutterers are independent of decision complexity but related to spatial and temporal coordination. (Author/DB)

Examines the relationship between users' expertise, task complexity of information system use, and artificial intelligence to provide the basis for a conceptual framework for considering the role that artificial intelligence might play in information systems. Cognitive and conceptual models are discussed, and cost effectiveness is considered. (27…

In three experiments, children of three through six years of age were generally better able to reproduce a perceiver's perspective if a visual cue in the perceiver's line of sight was salient. Children had greater difficulty when the task hinged on attending to configural cues. Availability of distinctive cues affixed to objects facilitated…

A sample of 48 children with and without musical training were presented with a melody of 9 notes and asked to select the line drawing that best depicted the melodic contour. Findings indicated a lengthy course of development of sensitivity to diatonic scale structure and suggested that musical training may enhance acquisition of this type of…

A graphical-decision rule for studying an item's behavior and admitting items onto a test form is proposed. The tool--the isthmus of acceptance--ameliorates some parameter stability problems common to binary item response theory models by using a functional representation of item performance, and it is tuned to match current standards. (TJH)

Stuttered sentences pronounced by 12 4- to 6-year-old children in spontaneous conversation were analyzed for length and grammatical complexity. Results indicated that sentences in which stuttering occurred within the first three words were significantly longer and more complex than sentences where no fluency failure was found. Implications for…

Measures the effects of presentation mode and perceived difficulty on retention of academic content material. Finds the main effects of presentation mode and difficulty to be significant; however, pairwise comparisons of means for mode did not show significant differences. (NH)

The relations between Angoff ratings (minimum passing levels) and the actual "p" values for borderline examinees were studied with 115 examinees taking the Certified Financial Planner examination. Findings do not suggest that the Angoff judges' task is nearly impossible, but they do suggest the need to improve standard-setting…

A sample of 144 mathematical tasks used during reform-oriented teaching was analyzed in terms of task features and cognitive demands. The ways cognitive demands of high-level tasks declined and factors associated with task changes were explored. Teachers used tasks that led to the development of students' thinking capacities. (MAK)

The effect of removing nonfunctioning items from multiple-choice tests was studied by examining change in difficulty, discrimination, and dimensionality. Results provide additional support for the benefits of eliminating nonfunctioning options, such as enhanced score reliability, reduced testing time, potential for broader domain sampling, and…

Ratings of test item relevance were collected from 57 practitioners from a pretest of a medical certifying examination. Ratings were correlated with item difficulty, but the relationship between ratings and item discrimination was less clear. Application of generalizability theory shows that reasonable estimates of item, stem, and total test…

In the context of producing academic research that is more accessible to people with intellectual disabilities, this article proposes publishing academic papers with a "parallel text" which would both provide a simplified version but also facilitate access to the main document. Background research on the idea of parallel texts and technical…