Twenty-four girls and 19 boys who failed quantity conservation tasks on a pretest were retested after having been exposed to a classroom demonstration on conservation. Results indicated that children who understood number conservation improved their quantity conservation performance more often than children who showed no understanding of number…

Four methods of item bias detection--transformed item difficulty, item discrimination expressed as Clemans' lambda, chi-square, and the three-parameter item characteristic curve--were studied to determine the degree of correspondence among them in identifying biased and unbiased items in reading and mathematics subtests of the 1978 SRA Achievement…

Describes the game STRATAGEM and its usage by university students preparing for examinations. The game, which comprises questions coded by topic and level of complexity (recall, application, and inference), is designed to focus student attention on important content, foster accurate assessment of team potential, and encourage risk-taking.…

Two experiments investigated psychological factors determining preschoolers' success or failure on a sequence-completion task involving temporal and causal ordering of events. Overall findings demonstrate that while preschoolers do understand temporal/causal relationships, their abilities are dependent on process variables demanded by the task…

The effectiveness of mnemonic (memory-enhancing) materials that were developed by the authors to teach fourth and fifth graders the state capitals of the United States was examined in two experiments. (Author/MP)

First year medical students answered parallel multiple-choice questions at different taxonomic levels as part of their diagnostic examinations. The results show that when content is held constant, students perform as well on interpretation and problem-solving questions as on recall questions. (Author/BW)

Examines the variables experienced teachers of deaf children use to make decisions about the difficulty of a text for use by their students and how effective teacher judgment actually is in determining text difficulty. (EKN)

Investigated the effects of assigned versus participatively set goals, and the effects of varying goal difficulty level on an arithmetic task with college students. Found that individuals with hard, assigned goals had higher performance than peers with lower goals set in a participative manner. (Author)

The authors question the furor over declining reading scores, since their study of the daily reading materials of white collar, skilled labor, unskilled labor, and retail personnel indicated little need for these job holders to function at more than a sixth-grade reading level. (Editor/SJL)

Four-year-olds succeeded in making comparisons between sets of objects when comparison questions called for comparing set with set or subset with subset. However, when comparison questions called for comparing set with subset, the children failed to complete such tasks successfully. (Author/DB)

Outlines three constructs of text difficulty: text-based (objective), performance-based (behavioral), and a combination of the two (subjective). (HOD)

Cliff's Index "c" derived from an item dominance matrix is utilized in a clustering approach, termed extracting Reliable Guttman Orders (ERGO), to isolate Guttman-type item hierarchies. A comparison of factor analysis to the ERGO is made on social distance data involving multiple ethnic groups. (Author/BW)

Investigated five-year-olds' abilities to determine the reference of anaphoric pronouns. Children had difficulty when a sentence contained more than one pronoun, especially when assigning the reference of a pronoun requiring an inference. The children's difficulties stemmed from forgetting premise information and from having problems in carrying…

The problem-solving performance of elderly individuals was facilitated by manipulating the demands of problem-solving tasks. The fact that elderly individuals can use more efficient strategies under certain circumstances suggests that the elderly have such strategies in their repertoires. (Author)

The preferred coding processes of 11-year-old children were investigated, as well as the effect of these preferences on recall of verbal material which varied by complexity of imagery, metaphor, and acoustic and semantic features. The hypothesized relationship between coding and personality was studied (f=fiche number). (MH)