Discusses how to develop performance standards based on objective, observable criteria and describes how the reference department at the University of Nebraska at Omaha developed standards to meet their needs. Goals for performance are explained, and preliminary and final versions of the reference desk performance standards are appended. (Contains…

Studied the relationships among motivation, persistence, and performance in a sample of 51 German college students. Path analysis showed that initial motivation influenced persistence but that the relationship between persistence and performance was disrupted because learners with more knowledge stopped sooner. (SLD)

Examined how 3- and 5-year-olds and adults extend names for human-made artifacts. Found that even 3-year-olds were more likely to provide artifact names (e.g., "knife") when they believed objects were intentionally created and to provide material-based descriptions (e.g., "plastic") when they believed objects were accidentally…

Examined whether 6-month-olds expect people to behave differently toward persons and inanimate objects. Found that infants habituated to an actor talking to something hidden behind an occluder looked longer at an object, whereas infants habituated to an actor reaching and swiping looked longer at a person. No difference in looking at stimuli was…

The effectiveness of video-based staff training with manager-led exercises in improving the performance of six staffers in residential support for persons with disabilities was examined. The training procedures improved performance in hand-washing, glove usage, and frequency of positive interaction, but not in the frequency of valued activities.…

This study investigated the relationship of 3-year olds' reliance on desire when predicting behavior and their performance on false-belief tasks. Results suggested that young children may use the desires of the agent, rather than their own desires, to predict behavior in standard false-belief paradigms. Older preschoolers also have difficulty…

A 40-year longitudinal study of creativity that began in 1958 in two schools in Minneapolis, Minnesota, found that girls identified as highly creative in elementary school have been fulfilling that potential as adults to a significantly higher degree those who were less creative. Sex role expectations are discussed. (Contains references.) (CR)

Examined effects of interfering information and instructions to forget on preschoolers' and kindergartners' story retention. Found that retroactive interference affected preschoolers' storage- and retrieval-based forgetting rates and kindergartners' storage-based forgetting rates. Intentional forgetting reduced retroactive interference primarily…

Two studies investigated whether language-specific patterns encoding manner and direction of motion in English and Greek affect adult and child speakers' performance on nonlinguistic motion tasks and linguistic descriptions of these motion events. Although the two linguistic groups differed in linguistic preferences, nonlinguistic task performance…

The effect of the reduction of the temporal envelope produced by multichannel compression on recognition was examined in 16 listeners with hearing loss, with particular focus on audibility of the speech signal. Multichannel compression improved speech recognition when superior audibility was provided by a two-channel compression system over linear…

Compared data for 7,839 female high school students with regard to risk-taking behavior related to sexuality to similar data for 141 high-performance female high school athletes. Findings suggest that participation in a high performance sports activity is positively associated with some reduced sexual risk-taking behaviors for adolescent females.…

A study examined the extent to which linguistic variation in the English language might have been affecting the performance of 160 rural preschoolers in South Carolina. When dialectal variations were not considered, the performance of the children differed from that of the normative populations on tests that assessed grammatical morphemes.…

Investigated whether individual and developmental differences in look duration were correlated with latency to disengage fixation from a visual stimulus for 3- and 4-month olds. Found that look duration was correlated with disengagement latency. Three-month olds showed slower latencies than 4-month olds. Long-looking infants showed greater…

Asked 19 Finnish children, aged 6 and 7, on three occasions in a school year, to group their classmates according to ability. Results suggest that the impact of school and its differential concept of ability changes children's perceptions, lessening social reasons for appraisal and increasing the use of performance-based criteria. (SLD)

Introduces a cost-benefit transfer model which considers a performer's perception of need, sensibility, and effort to determine the likelihood of putting to use an idea learned in training. The model predicts use through a mathematical formula: the product of need and sensibility divided by effort. Case evidence of academic physicians are cited in…