The present experiment tested the hypothesis that effort attribution given for prior achievement is effective in promoting subsequent achievement behaviors. Forty children drawn from two elementary schools and lacking in subtraction skills received training and opportunities to solve subtraction problems. In the context of training, children…

This study was designed to examine complexity of maternal language to 4-, 6-, and 8-month-old male and female infants in a laboratory situation as measured by mean length of utternace (MLU), frequencies of certain sentence types, and other syntactic indices. Subjects were 36 mothers and their infants. There were six male and six female infants at…

This analysis involved the ten events of the men's decathlon in all performances which scored 8,000 points or higher, based on the 1962 Scoring Tables of the International Amateur Athletic Federation. It attempted to (1) determine the interrelationships among the events and the final scores, (2) look for areas of difference compared to sub-8,000…

Elementary school teachers chosen for their effectiveness in consistently producing achievement gains in their pupils were observed to determine how difficult a teacher's questions should be for students to learn the maximum amount of material. The collected data, correlated with residualized student achievement gain scores (averaged over four…

Current views both of reading and of understanding spoken language conceptualize the process of deriving meaning as similar to hypothesis testing. The listener or reader is seen as selecting whatever information is required to confirm the hypothesized meaning. In the present study, 60 children (12 each in grades four through eight) reworded…

Six workshops, composed of 799 participants representing 429 agencies in the North Atlantic, Midwest, Southern, and Western regions, were conducted during September-November 1969 by the Council of Diploma Programs of the National League for Nursing. At each workshop a nurse educator gave a presentation to familiarize the participants with the…

In measuring affective evaluations of complexity, two questions have been generated by findings in the literature: (1) whether the response indicators, "interesting,""pleasing," and "liking," represent interchangeable labels for the same evaluative responses, and (2) whether these evaluations evidence a positive attitude towards complex…

This annotated booklist includes easy-to-read materials for new adult readers. Criteria for selection of the materials were: (1) the content of the books and the form of presentation must be suitable for adults; (2) the materials must be suitable for persons of varying cultural and ethnic backgrounds; and (3) they must be oriented toward the urban…

The handbook, part of the "Career Survival Skills Kit" (described in CE 001 445), explains that the kit is designed to help upper elementary and junior and senior high school students understand and use resources for life and career planning. Basic to the kit's approach to career development are behavioral objectives. They provide a…

An experiment was carried out on perceived difficulty of a simple attention task. Seven complex stimulus matrices were used, consisting of different numbers of pairs of consonants. The subjects' task was to search for targets determined by the experimenter one by one. Search time was measured as performance criterion. Perceived difficulty of the…

When one learns complex material, the important thing appears to be the ability to understand the material. Once understanding occurs, learning and remembering follow automatically. The conventional psychological literature says little about the processes involved in the learning of complex material--material that takes weeks, months, and even…

Selected cognitive developments presumed to mediate the development of achievement motivation are described. Age trends for four causal schemes involving the concepts of effort and ability from 5 to 13 years of age are presented. Developments related to ability, task difficulty, and incentive value are also described. (Author/JMB)

Two techniques for writing achievement test items to accompany instructional materials are contrasted: writing items from statements of instructional objectives, and writing items from semi-automated rules for transforming instructional statements. Both systems resulted in about the same number of faulty items. (Author/JKS)

Proposes explanations and further research considerations for the apparent psychological equivalence of the terms "complexity" and "novelty" as they refer to information theory, stimulus generalization, and subject expectancy effects. (RL)

This study explore possible explanations for the decline in highly creative contributions in old age. Examined are the role of decrements in specific divergent thinking abilities and the decline in preference for complexity as factors in the decline in creative contributions. (BD)