Investigated the effects of participative versus assigned goal setting on intrinsic motivation for interesting and boring tasks. Participative and assigned goal setting had no significantly different effects on performance if the goal was held consistently difficult, but had different effects on intrinsic motivation at different levels of task…

Proposition analysis was used to equate the text base of two essays with different readability levels. Easier reading essays were given higher scores than difficult reading essays. The results appear to identify another noncontent influence on essay test scores, leaving increasingly less variance for differences in content. (Author/PN)

Four- and five-year-old children were asked to compare the burning times of pairs of partially synchronous lights differing in intensity, bulb size, or both. (Author/MP)

A study of spontaneous sign language of six deaf children of hearing parents, examined three times in a 15-month period, is described. Processes and structures representative of and not representative of signed English were sought at various levels of linguistic complexity, including developing semantics, and compared with American Sign Language.…

With first-grade and college students, examines barrier effects as a function of the task used to assess subjects' cognitive maps. One group, asked to give rank-ordering judgments, had to keep an entire spatial layout in mind. The second group made direct estimates of the distance between two objects. (RH)

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)