This report gives an interim evaluation for 1982-83 of the Kindergarten Reinforcement project in the Cleveland Public Schools. This project, designed to promote optimal development of disadvantaged children's basic learning skills relevant to subsequent successful school experiences, provides kindergarten teachers with supplementary instructional…

A study investigated the way in which children make use of morphemic information when they are learning to spell. Specifically, it examined the use of morphemic information in spelling compound words; the use made of morphemic information when adding suffixes to words, and the way the morphological rule governing the formation of the past tense is…

More than 1,000 studies of reading research published between July 1, 1982, and June 30, 1983 are summarized in this report. The studies are arranged into six categories: (1) Summaries of Reading Research, (2) Teacher Preparation and Practice, (3) The Sociolgy of Reading, (4) Physiology and Psychology of Reading, (5) The Teaching of Reading, and…

This study develops and employs the construct, personal orientation to science learning, to study the processes by which children construct meaning as they learn science in school. The theoretical bases of the thesis are the commitments of a constructivist view of learning and the psychological framework of George Kelly's Personal Construct…

The relationship of comprehension monitoring to writing was investigated in a multiple-measure, longitudinal study of writing skill development. Subjects were approximately 100 elementary school students who were followed during the first three grades. At the end of first grade, relationships were found between ambiguity detection, reading, and…

The critical and creative thinking dispositions which are intrinsic to children's critical thought may reflect the standards of an adult culture which values verbalized thought over other kinds of human intelligence. Primary critical and creative thinking dispositions are those which help the child explore the world. These are biological processes…

Misconceptions are systematic, intelligently conceived, and quite reasonable theories that have been constructed on the basis of experience. Research studies on misconceptions have indicated that students develop intelligently conceived and sophisticated concepts of science. Although some of these are compatible with the principles of modern…

This booklet describes research carried out under sponsorship of the Psychological Sciences Division of the U.S. Office of Naval Research during Fiscal Year 1985. The booklet is divided into three programmatic research areas: (1) Engineering Psychology; (2) Personnel and Training; and (3) Group Psychology. Each program is described by an overview…

A study examined acquisition of new vocabulary through oral stories in first-, third-, and fifth-grade children. Each subject heard four stories, each including four nonsense words repeated three times. These novel words represented common nouns whose meanings could be derived from propositional information associated with their occurrence. The…

The processing of incoming psychological information along the network, or schemata, of self-knowledge was studied to determine the convergent and discriminant validity of the patterns of schemata-specific response latencies. Fifty-three female and 52 male university students completed the Basic Personality Inventory (BPI). BPI scales assess…

Reviewed are recent studies of the cognitive development of Chinese children. The discussion identifies: (1) systematic studies of children's cognitive development; (2) studies on the development of thinking; (3) studies of memory development; and (4) studies on the influences of various national cultures and education on the development of…

Analyses of deviant sexual behaviors have most often derived from psychodynamic or behavioral theory. Little systematic research attention has been paid to the role of intervening cognitive variables such as social perception and the causal attribution process. Two studies were conducted to examine differences in cognition between child molesters…

Stanford University's new Symbolic Systems Program is an interdisciplinary undergraduate program focusing on understanding the nature of intelligent behavior. It brings together the disciplines of cognitive psychology, logic, computer science and artificial intelligence, philosophy, and linguistics in a newly emerging field of research concerned…

This report presents two experiments that compared the performance of map experts to that of novices. Subjects (from the areas of geography, educational psychology, and sociology) were 13 university faculty members in experiment one and 12 undergraduate students in experiment two. Following a practice trial, the learning of a logical map and a…

This is the second annual report of the Army Research Institute's (ARI) basic research program. It describes the current focus of the program and the individual research efforts sponsored within each of the four principal thrust areas: ability assessment; instructional technology; cognitive processing limitations; and intelligent systems. In…