Of 171 undergraduates, 90 viewed a videotape of a "friendly" recruiter and 81 an "unfriendly" recruiter. The former group made significantly more positive inferences regarding the recruiter's organization than did those watching the "unfriendly" tape. These inferences affected their attraction to the job. (SK)

Suggests using portraits in history instruction. Uses the story and portrait of Pocahontas to show how expectations can differ from reality. Discusses the role of inference in interpreting what a portrait tells the viewer. Argues that portraits can "soften" social studies instruction and remind students that historical figures were real…

Finds that perceptual identification of target words explicitly presented was significantly higher than that of new targets and that targets inferred to maintain coherence and targets predicted by the text were identified as well as explicit targets and significantly better than targets schematically appropriate to the text. (SR)

Tests how domain-related knowledge influences inference generation during text comprehension. Examines local and global inferences. Finds that all knowledge groups process sentences involved in local inferences similarly, but not global inferences. Suggests that individuals with prior knowledge use their knowledge actively to generate global…

Nine- to 16-month-old infants explored pairs of novel toys in 2 conditions: violated expectation, in which the first toy produced an interesting nonobvious property and the second toy did not; and interest control, in which neither toy produced the interesting property. Infants persistently attempted to reproduce the interesting property in the…

Focuses on inferential processes in reading and the question of whether those processes are automatic. Examines the importance of inference generation during reading comprehension. Describes research that investigates which inferences appear to be automatic. Discusses characteristics of skilled reading that are related to the automaticity of…

Concludes that, whereas inference processing may be impeded by the relative lack of familiarity of the content of expository text, it is not strictly precluded. Indicates rather that inference processing in the comprehension of expository text is regulated by the information-processing constraints of the reading task and by the discourse and…

The Hallidayan notions of theme and rheme pose an interesting challenge to linguists in their attempts to pin them down more specifically. Argues that, because the thematic structure of the clause organizes itself as a message, a useful starting point in theme/rheme research is an understanding of how clausal messages are typically processed by…

Describes uses of statistical research tools: descriptive statistics, correlation, regression, and inferential statistics. Addresses concerns about statistical analysis in agricultural research. (SK)

Two experiments assessed preschoolers' understanding of objects possessing a property in part only and their understanding that different parts of an object may possess opposed properties. Results suggested that children as young as 3 years possess a sophisticated ability to reason about the heritability of properties from parts to wholes.…

This study examined the influence of shape similarity and labels on 13-month-olds' inductive inferences. In 3 experiments, 123 infants were presented with novel target objects with or without a nonvisible property, followed by test objects that varied in shape similarity. When objects were not labeled, infants generalized the nonvisible property…

Teachers often wrongly presume that all students would interpret a three-dimensional image presented in a two-dimensional manner in the same way. They need to be specific as to how questions are stated especially in real-life situations, where alternative interpretations are possible.

This paper presents two experiments testing whether an approach to revise a text that fosters the reader's active processing benefits both high and low-knowledge readers. A history text and two alternative revised versions, one fostering the reader's inferential activity and the other reducing it, were employed. Junior high school students with…

The APA Task Force on Statistical Inference recently recommended reporting effect sizes alongside results of statistical significance tests. The purpose of this article is to investigate effect size usage in gifted education research and to follow up on a similar investigation published by Plucker (1997). A content analysis of effect size…

This study investigated the mind-reading abilities of 19 adults with Asperger syndrome and 19 typically developing adults. Two static mind-reading tests and a more naturalistic empathic accuracy task were used. In the empathic accuracy task, participants attempted to infer the thoughts and feelings of target persons, while viewing a videotape of…