Eventually, as the research on any one topic advances in technical sophistication, it may well become more and more trivial until finally it fades away, while researchers once again wait for the appearance of a nova. (Author)

This study is concerned with the preschool and kindergarten phases of an ongoing longitudinal investigation of effects of preschool on educationally advantaged children. Preschool data including demographics, IQ, social competency, and school readiness are reported. Although social competency was enhanced by preschool, gains occurred for both…

Some difficulties with field experimental research designs using groups of subjects are discussed. Special attention is given to the problem of interpreting the significant results and how the obtained results can be generalized. Single-subject designs are suggested as suitable alternatives and a few such designs are presented. (Author)

Study focuses on children aged 3 to 5 years from 3 London areas. Contrary to expectation, awareness of differences in skin color was not a simple function of age and contact with colored children and adults; no clear evidence of prejudiced thinking was found in the subjects studied. (RJ)

Finke and Kurtzman report that fields of resolution increase with increases in the diameter of both perceived and imagined circular patterns. In contrast, we find no such increase for imagined circular patterns when the experimenter is not aware of the experimental predictions, even though our subjects received imagery training. (Author/RD)

An experiment was conducted to examine how objectives influence organization of information recalled from text. Objectives were hypothesized to affect sequence of attention, rehearsal during a review period, and to serve as retrieval cues. Results indicated that organization by objectives occurs during rehearsal but not encoding or retrieval…

Four experiments show that observers can selectively attend to one of two stationary superimposed pictures. Selective recognition occurred with large displays in which observers were free to make eye movements during a 3-sec exposure and with small displays in which observers were instructed to fixate steadily on a point. (Author/RD)

Two experiments related inspection speed to text relevance. While specific goals or questions produced variable inspection speeds, a general purpose in reading did not. Text information related to reading goals was more likely to be retained. Results are explained in terms of storage demands imposed by each category of reading goal. (Author/RD)

To discover how students felt about being experimental subjects, 152 introductory psychology student research subjects answered questionnaires about their evaluation of the experience. Results showed that, while students were aware of low-level coercion, they found the experience worthwhile and did not object to receiving extra credit as a reward.…

College students wrote summaries of short passages to assess their ability to identify important information. Naive summaries judged as "better" contained more major semantic roles, such as agent, than did summaries judged "not as good". Students wrote better summaries when instructed to use major semantic roles within the passage. (Author/RD)

A descriptive analysis of research practices and a meta-analysis of control group effect sizes are used to address Hawthorne effects in educational experiments. The analysis of 86 studies and 256 treatment/Hawthorne/no-treatment control group effect size comparisons indicate that artifact controls have limited utility in dealing with the Hawthorne…