Examined the connection between gender differences in examinees' familiarity, interest, and negative emotional reactions to items on the College Board's Advanced Placement Psychology Examination and the items' differential item functioning (DIF). Gender differences for a sample of 717 students for the 3 variables were substantially related to the…

A study of graduate students examined how learners process videotaped materials on familiar and unfamiliar topics. Analysis of interviews suggested that all participants interpreted the content of the videotape relative to topics with which they were familiar. In their responses, those familiar with topics offered more inferences, while those…

Two experiments used paired-comparisons to investigate 3-month olds' recognition of dynamic visual events after various retention intervals. Results indicated a changing pattern of attentional preferences over time consistent with models of infant recognition memory in which novelty, familiarity, and null preferences are considered conjointly and…

Examined how Japanese 2- and 4-year-olds assigned meaning to novel nouns associated with familiar and unfamiliar animals and inanimate objects. Found that in the absence of useful information from syntax, the 2-year-olds were able to fast map a noun to its meaning by elegantly coordinating word-learning biases and other available sources of…

For students to develop an understanding of functions, they must have opportunities to solve problems that require them to transfer between algebraic, numeric, and graphic representations (transfer problems). Research has confirmed student difficulties with certain types of transfer problems and has suggested instructional factors as a possible…

This study investigates factors affecting the degree of novice physics students application of the naive impetus theory. Six hundred and fourteen first-year university engineering physics students answered the Force Concept Inventory as a pre-test for their calculus-based course. We examined the degree to which students consistently applied the…

Transfer students represent an increasingly important group in four-year schools. To date, only limited information on the research abilities and library needs of this group has been reported. A survey of information needs and skills of incoming transfer students at Western Washington University (WWU) showed that while many reported some…

Two studies investigated the relationship between working memory capacity (WMC), adult age, and the resolution of conflict between familiarity and recollection in short-term recognition tasks. Experiment 1 showed a specific deficit of young adults with low WMC in rejecting intrusion probes (i.e., highly familiar probes) in a modified Sternberg…

In 3 experiments, young and older adults studied lists of unrelated word pairs and were given confidence-rated item and associative recognition tests. Several different models of recognition were fit to the confidence-rating data using techniques described by S. Macho (2002, 2004). Concordant with previous findings, item recognition data were best…

Like all probabilistic decisions, recognition memory judgments are based on inferences about the strength and quality of stimulus familiarity. In recent articles, B. W. A. Whittlesea and J. Leboe (2000; J. Leboe & B. W. A. Whittlesea, 2002) proposed that such memory decisions entail various heuristics, similar to well-known heuristics in overt…

In this study, we developed and validated a questionnaire to assess teachers' perceptions of their actual and preferred school-level environment, investigated whether teachers involved with Outcomes-Based Education (OBE) perceive the school-level environment differently from those who are not, and investigated factors in the school-level…

The present study investigated the language familiarity hypothesis formulated by Mackay [(1970). How does language familiarity influence stuttering under delayed auditory feedback? "Perceptual and Motor Skills", 30, 655-669] that bilinguals speak faster and stutter less under delayed auditory feedback (DAF) when speaking their more…

Readers construct at least 2 interrelated mental representations when they comprehend a text: a textbase and a situation model. Two experiments were conducted with recognition memory to examine how domain knowledge and text coherence influence readers' textbase and situation-model representations. In Experiment 1, participants made remember-know…

In this article second language (L2) knowledge of Dutch grammatical gender is investigated. Adult speakers of German, English and a Romance language (French, Italian or Spanish) were investigated to explore the role of transfer in learning the Dutch grammatical gender system. In the first language (L1) systems, German is the most similar to Dutch…

Having grown up in an age of rapidly developing electronic communication technology, today's students come to higher education with high levels of comfort and familiarity with computer-mediated communication (CMC, hereafter). The students' level of comfort with CMC, coupled with CMC's promises of enabling supplemental class discussion as well as…