A total of 224 subjects participated in a study to determine how children and adults comprehend logical connectives. Specifically, the study examined the effects of age, content, and practice on the encoding and combination of logical relationships expressed by six types of logical connectives: conjunction, disjunction, conditionality,…

This research discusses the probability of child witnesses providing a complete and accurate description of an event. Children have been regarded as particularly inaccurate, highly suggestible, and basically unreliable in court cases. Psychologists have concluded that younger children are much more suggestible than older children or adults, and a…

This paper reports on an experiment undertaken to delineate more clearly the relationship between the naming process in children and certain aspects of the environment which may play a role in that process. The investigation concerned the effect of manipulation and of object novelty on naming. Sixteen children, ten girls and six boys, ranging in…

This paper describes part of a larger study dealing with syntax and semantics of the child's early speech about motion and location. It suggests that goal, defined as the point at which a motion ends and a resulting locative state begins, is the organizing principle for the semantics of motion and location. The data presented here are from two…

Skills tutorials for first year engineering students at the University of New South Wales, Australia, were introduced in order to develop an awareness of certain conceptual skills commonly exercised by practicing engineers. Particular skills include the manipulation of information in different forms, translation from one form to another,…

This paper offers a variety of approaches to teaching the concept of time. Many social studies courses traditionally emphasize time as measured by clocks and as useful for recording when events occur in relation to each other. In addition to this approach, the author suggests that students should reflect upon four other modes of time. These are…

This guide is concerned with the answering and asking of questions in college-level courses. Suggestions are offered regarding questioning techniques that are appropriate for lecture classes as well as for discussion groups. Ways to help students answer their own questions are to repeat the question by paraphrasing it, redirecting the question,…

An information processing approach was applied to the development and validation of a test battery intended for personnel selection, classification, and guidance; and design of training programs. The approach specifies that tests should measure specific cognitive processes and basic abilities, rather than prior experience. Tests should be short,…

The educational significance of wrong answers on multiple choice tests was investigated in over 4,000 subjects, aged 7 to 20. Gorham's Proverbs Test--which requires the interpretation of a proverb sentence--was administered and repeated five months later. Four questions were addressed: (1) what can the pattern of answer choice, across age, using…

The main purpose of this study was to address this question: When preschool children are exposed to novel objects, will their tactual and verbal information-seeking about these objects and the amount of information they remember about these same objects be influenced by whether an adult labels them as things "for girls" or "for…

This study focused on two questions concerning children's attention to verbal stimulus: How do children of different reading ability attend to repeatedly presented words? Are there differences in children's patterns of attention to words as compared to less meaningful materials? Toward the end of an academic year, 40 first-graders and 40…

Two kinds of research groups have evolved in higher education: one devoted to student learning and the other to teacher training. Both groups share a common interest in the development of student thinking and appear to be proceeding along parallel paths, which may be to their disadvantage. At the same time, some researchers in teacher training are…

The hypothesis is investigated that unproportional experience with uncontrollable situations for black and lower class individuals leads to an increased susceptibility to the poorer cognitive performance indicative of helplessness. Black and white lower and middle-class second and tenth graders were given no problems, solvable diagraph problems,…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 24 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: the influence of additional supportive context upon the reader's ability to identify the main idea of a paragraph; effects of metaphors and paraphrases as…

The inability of some children to cope with the pain from severe burns may result in depressive withdrawal or death. An understanding of the emotional impact of pain on children is essential to improve their ability to cope. A pilot project with seriously burned children employed three dependent measures to identify children who cope adaptively…