Evaluated respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) and heart period in 5-month-olds during interaction challenges. Found that during object-mediated challenge, RSA increases were uniquely related to positive engagement. During person-mediated challenge, subjects showed more complex integration of autonomic and behavioral responses such that only infants…

Presents information on the extent of alcohol use and other drug use among college students. Alcohol rates are very high among college students, with use higher among males than females. White students are highest in heavy drinking, black students are lowest and Hispanics are intermediate. Results indicate colleges should do more to reduce heavy…

Considers factors that help and hinder experienced instructors in transitioning to teaching online. Highlights include intrinsic personality characteristics as measured by the Myers Briggs and Gregorc Transactional Ability Inventory; job support; and training to acquire online teaching skills. (Author/LRW)

Presents the results of a meta-analysis of cross-time relations of academic/cognitive and social/behavioral readiness assessments from preschool to second grade that used 70 longitudinal studies. Discusses findings in terms of assessment and conceptualization of school readiness, the role of school and classroom experiences in individual…

The authors investigated the influence of several personality traits on exercise adherence and exercise self-efficacy for 168 undergraduate students. At all levels of exercise adherence, students with different personality traits had different amounts of exercise self-efficacy. Implications for college counselors working with students to improve…

The domain specificity and generality of an important critical thinking skill was examined by administering nine reasoning and decision-making tasks to 125 adults. Performance across tasks displayed considerable domain specificity, but five tasks displayed moderate convergence. Performance on tasks that displayed domain generality was more…

Focuses on the role of learning style and individual differences in English-as-a-Second/Foreign-Language (ESL/EFL) learning. Discusses ways to help ESL/EFL educators and program designers gain a better understanding of the human differences in learning and to assist them in selecting classroom teaching strategies when designing curricula.…

Proposes that readability formulas cannot predict text difficulty. Presents results of an experiment designed to demonstrate that "text difficulty" is determined by individual differences (perception) and not by the objective qualities of a text. (NH)

Preschool teachers and directors from special education, Head Start, and day care centers completed a questionnaire assessing their perceptions of diversity and resources utilized in relation to diversity. Respondents indicated that children with "differences" should be treated like "children"; children with "differences" were defined by the…

Examines 5535 English female students between 13 and 15 years old for attitudes toward the safety of their environments. Accounts for individual personality differences. Finds that personality and rurality are significant predictors of how students see their local area. Females in rural areas hold more positive attitudes toward their environment.…

A longitudinal study examined memory span at 5, 7, and 12 months in full-term and low-birth-weight preterm infants. Findings were similar for both groups: longer spans were more difficult, especially at younger ages, memory capacity increased over first year of life, there was marked recency effect for spans of 3 and 4 at all ages, and modest…

The current research explored children's ability to recognize and explain different concepts both with and without reference to physical objects so as to provide insight into the development of children's addition and subtraction understanding. In Study 1, 72 7- to 9-year-olds judged and explained a puppet's activities involving three conceptual…

This study examines the updating ability of poor or good problem solvers. Seventy-eight fourth-graders, 43 good and 35 poor arithmetic word problem-solvers, performed the Updating Test used in Palladino et al. [Palladino, P., Cornoldi, C., De Beni, R., and Pazzaglia F. (2002). Working memory and updating processes in reading comprehension. Memory…

Tower of Hanoi has become a popular tool in cognitive and neuropsychology to assess a set of behaviors collectively referred to as executive functions. Substantial variability in performance on the Tower of Hanoi (TOH) disk-transfer task among normally functioning young adults, and potential contributions to these individual differences, were…

Can children reason the Bayesian way? We argue that the answer to this question depends on how numbers are represented, because a representation can do part of the computation. We test, for the first time, whether Bayesian reasoning can be elicited in children by means of natural frequencies. We show that when information was presented to fourth,…