Cluster analyses using the Almost Perfect Scale--Revised (APS-R; R. B. Slaney, M. Mobley, J. Trippi, J. Ashby, & D. G. Johnson, 1996) yielded 3 clusters that represented adaptive perfectionists, maladaptive perfectionists, and nonperfectionists. Maladaptive perfectionist scores were strongly correlated with self-critical depression, but not…

This study examined the interaction between speech perception and sentential context among 13 poor readers and 49 good readers in grades one to three. Children's performance was examined on tasks assessing expressive and receptive vocabulary, reading skill, phonological awareness, pseudoword repetition, and phoneme identification. Good readers…

Girls are outperforming boys in public examinations. However, this does not apply to "all boys" and "all girls", nor is it true of every subject. This paper questions the claims made based upon the statistical evidence and goes on to look at social, individual and school factors that may contribute to observed gender differences in school…

Background: The purpose of this study was to identify individual characteristics associated with community integration of adults with an intellectual disability. Method: A group of 37 males with high support needs, and who had previously lived in a large institution, participated in the study. Using proxy respondents, data were collected on three…

There may be many different reasons why children have problems paying attention. One child might be visually oversensitive. Another child, who is oversensitive to smells, might be distracted by the teachers' perfume. Auditory sensitivity can be just as distracting. As such, it is important to remember that children with developmental difficulties…

Teachers must learn to recognize and eliminate gender bias, because it can limit students' ambitions and accomplishments (Sanders, 2003). A gender-neutral position practiced by teachers recognizes individual and group differences, and believes that both girls and boys can reach their fullest potential if they are sensitive to the quality and level…

Because there are so many chance factors that potentially affect the psychological development of gifted students, the outhor has sorted them into categories. For example, there are genetic, lifestyle, environmental, overarching vs. instance, experiential, and coincidental chance factors. To do justice to this topic, a series of columns will focus…

Despite compelling evidence that analogy skills are available to beginning readers, few studies have actually explored the possibility of identifying individual differences in young children's analogy skills in early reading. The present study examined individual differences in children's use of orthographic and phonological relations between…

Attendance at trials of perpetrators could be retraumatizing for crime victims suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder. To investigate this hypothesis, two studies were conducted in which retraumatization was defined as a significant increase in posttraumatic stress reactions. A cross-sectional study of 137 victims of rape and nonsexual…

As schools become increasingly multicultural, teachers need special sensitivity to recognize differences and intercultural competences to be able to support the personal and academic growth of diverse students. This paper introduces newly qualified teachers' conceptions of diversity and intercultural competence in a Finnish context. The teachers…

This article examines whether the idea of "temperament" is a useful construct for families to understand babies' and toddlers' behavior. The author suggests that "regulatory skill" may be a more neutral term than temperament for parents and practitioners to use in discussing individual differences among babies and toddlers and suggests that…

Several different methodological approaches that have been used in studying language in children with autism are outlined. In classic studies, children with autism are compared to comparison groups typically matched on age, IQ, or mental age in order to identify which aspects of language are uniquely impaired in autism. Several methodological…

Fluid/spatial intelligence, crystallized intelligence and their relationships to verbal and visuospatial working memory (WM) were studied. A total of 120 Finnish Air Force recruits participated in this study. Fluid/spatial intelligence was assessed using four different tasks, while crystallized intelligence was defined with the help of test scores…

Having taught both mainstream and special needs middle school students and in an alternative high school, the author resists the concept that all children are capable of doing the same work. She contends that there is no one best teaching style any more than there is any one best learning style. She suggests that a teacher needs to find his or her…

Adults learned the meanings of rare words (e.g., gloaming) and then made meaning judgments on pairs of words. The 1st word was a trained rare word, an untrained rare word, or an untrained familiar word. Event-related potentials distinguished trained rare words from both untrained rare and familiar words, first at 140 ms and again at 400-600 ms…