This case study of Fairchild Semiconductor, a global company, illustrates how leadership training that stresses personal mastery (the ability to achieve a vision through recognizing and addressing individual and team obstacles) can lead to performance improvement. Topics include management skills; change agents; team and individual goals; and…

Provides instructional developers' (ID) insights and observations based on the experiences of a training and development organization, Sprint's University of Excellence (UE), as it evolved from a small group of 20-25 individuals in 1990 to a large business unit comprising almost 400 individuals in 1999. Discussion includes course development…

Changes in feature awareness and production during phonological intervention were examined in four preschool children with severe phonological impairments. Results indicated that the rate and degree of change in awareness did not always parallel production performance, suggesting that both feature awareness and production should be considered when…

Two experiments examined whether associating an imitation task with an operant task affected 6-month-olds' memory for either task. Results indicated that infants successfully imitated a puppet's action for up to 2 weeks only if the associated operant task (pressing a lever to activate a miniature train) was retrieved first. Follow-up study…

Preschoolers viewed stimulus sets comprised of a sample picture and three types of matches and were asked to choose a match that "went with" each sample. Children's choices indicated that a shift occurs between 3 and 4 years of age from a taxonomic bias to a thematic bias. Animate sample stimuli enhanced children's tendency to adopt…

Trained 3-, 5-, and 8-year-olds in temporal bisection task, with nonstandard comparison stimuli spaced linearly between short or long standard visual stimuli. Statistical analyses and results from different theoretical models of the data all suggested that temporal sensitivity was higher in the 8-year-olds than in younger groups, even when the…

Two experiments examined relation between age-related changes in retention and age-related changes in the misinformation effect. Found large age-related retention differences when participants were interviewed immediately and after 1 day, but after 6 weeks, differences were minimal. Exposure to misleading information increased commission errors.…

The authors examined the effect of prereading relevance instructions on reading time and learning for 2 types of text. Experiment 1 found that relevance instructions increased learning for relevant segments without increasing reading time when reading a scientific text sentence by sentence on a computer. In contrast, the same segments were learned…

The author reports on homeless people in London who have conducted the largest ever research study of the barriers to employment and employability faced by the homeless. A group of eight "peer researchers"--all with a background of homelessness, all current volunteers at Groundswell UK, an organisation which promotes self-help…

Investigations of reading have focused largely on two component processes, phonological processing and orthographic processing. However, a number of unresolved issues have hampered progress in the investigation of these abilities. Three such issues that formed the focus of the present study were (1) the extent to which tasks used to operationalize…

This paper looks at Ofsted and particularly special measures regimes as part of a disciplinary mechanism. It examines issues such as school effectiveness theories, the increasing powers of Ofsted, and life under special measures and links it to performativity, discipline and surveillance using the metaphor of the panopticon. The change in…

In addition to the potential that computer-based testing (CBT) offers, empirical evidence has found that identical computerized and paper-and-pencil tests have not produced equivalent test-taker performance. Referred to as the "mode effect," previous literature has identified many factors that may be responsible for such differential performance.…

Why are young children's utterances short? This elicited imitation study used a new task--double imitation--to investigate the factors that contribute to children's failure to lexicalize sentence subjects. Two-year-olds heard a triad of sentences singly and attempted to imitate each; they then again heard the same triad singly and again attempted…

On 29 November, 2004, NCSL held its first distributed leadership conference. A website, and pack of materials complemented this event. The pack comprises a variety of research findings on distributed leadership in school and materials to support schools in their development of this management concept. In this article, the author presents a summary…

The hypothesis is introduced that 1 source of shift costs is the strengthening of task-related associations occurring whenever an overt response is produced. The authors tested this account by examining shift effects following errors and error compensation processes. The authors predicted that following a specific type of error, called task…