Investigates age differences in the impact of play on subsequent tool-use, the influences of task characteristics on the impact of play on tool-use, the ways play aids tool-use, and the effect of play richness on tool-use among 30 children in each of three age groups (from four to five, six to seven, and eight to ten years of age). (RH)

Assesses the range of reading difficulty in three sets of encyclopedias by correlating readability with grade levels. (AEA)

Comprehension was compared for speeded reading and listening to compressed speech. No difference between reading and listening comprehension was found at any of the speeds or difficulty levels, contrary to previous suggestions of a listening disadvantage. (Author/GK)

When college students attempted to integrate multiple cues into a single value judgment, the resulting cognitive load did not simplify cue-judgment relationships. Cue values were translated into judgment-relevant subjective values before integration. Findings support the information integration theory. (Author/CP)

Second and sixth graders acquired information about a large-scale environment either actively or passively. They were subsequently asked to estimate distances in either active or passive response style. Unlike the older children, second graders did not estimate distances accurately when acquisition and response activities were incongruent.…

Defining the difficulty of a task includes how long the task takes; its features, complexity, and newness; and understanding/willingness to complete it. Problems with determining difficulty levels make it questionable to claim that higher levels of a qualifications framework are more difficult than lower levels. (SK)

Explores the perceived complexity and urgency defined by school principals for planning processes and plans for policy issues that form the Israeli educational agenda. Advances proposition that the higher the urgency attributed to a specific issue, the lower the probability that educators will adequately address its complexity and create plans…

Reyna and Brainerd supplement arguments they made previously in this issue by advancing five additional reasons for preferring output-interference explanations over the resources hypothesis. (RH)

The main finding that three- and four-year-old children can make inferences relating numerosity and one-to-one correspondence information implicate more mathematical knowledge than Piaget attributed to young children. Their knowledge does not appear to be as closely tied to counting and other action schemas as other accounts of early numerical…

Tests the hypotheses that overconfidence occurs when strength is high and weight is low and that underconfidence occurs when weight is high and strength is low in 4 experiments with 153 students. Discusses weighing evidence, overconfidence/underconfidence in intuitive judgments, and item difficulty's effect on overconfidence. Relates the…

The relative difficulty of seven test wiseness skills was studied with 243 undergraduates, who completed a measure of such skills. The use of specific determiners as a cue was significantly more challenging than eliminating irrelevant alternatives, selecting the alternative with the most information, or using grammar cues. (SLD)

Compared three methods for developing a common metric under item response theory through simulation. For smaller numbers of common items, linking using the characteristic curve method yielded smaller root mean square differences for both item discrimination and difficulty parameters. For larger numbers of common items, the three methods were…

An item response theory model based on the Rasch model is proposed for composite tasks, those decomposed into subtasks of different kinds. The model, which is illustrated with an application to spelling tasks, constrains the difficulties of the composite tasks to be linear combinations of the difficulties of the subtask items. (SLD)

Ensuring item and pool security in a continuous testing environment is explored through a new method of controlling exposure rate of items conditional on ability level in computerized testing. Properties of this conditional control on exposure rate, when used in conjunction with a particular adaptive testing algorithm, are explored using simulated…

A statistic used by R. Meijer (1994) to determine person-fit referred to the number of errors from the deterministic Guttman model (L. Guttman, 1950), but this was, in fact, based on the number of errors from the deterministic Guttman model as defined by J. Loevinger (1947, 1948). (SLD)