Results are reported from a study of the learning styles of 306 high school students. The study examined learning style characteristics (abstraction, concreteness, reflection, activity); comparisons between adolescent and adult learning styles; and differences between freshmen and seniors, males and females, and slow-track and fast-track learners.…

A validation study of five checklists for assessing two-year-olds' word production revealed that the lists produced comparable mean production scores, reflected age differences, and preserved individual differences in total production and in production of linguistic categories such as nouns, verbs, open class items, and closed class items.…

There is probably no widespread educational practice as thoroughly discredited as retention in grade. If the research undercutting this practice is sound, the task is to uproot outdated misconceptions appealing to educators'"common sense" wisdom. An Arizona study's influence on the attitudes of community leaders, local teachers, and…

Examined potential central processing strategy differences among subgroups of children on a series of elaborative encoding tasks. Children in lower verbal and learning ability subgroups differed from those in higher ability groups in how they shared, discriminated, and selectively allocated resources between recall tasks. (RH)

Examined the role of individual differences in working memory and lexical access in age- and reading skill-related differences in performance on phonological synthesis tasks. The performance of 28 kindergarten, first-, and second-grade students with normal reading skills, and that of 28 reading-disabled second graders, was compared under four…

Investigates the relationship between early interactional patterns and later cognitive performance in 29 infant-mother pairs. Results indicate that cognitive milestones are relatively uniform in the first two years of life. Socio-emotional development showed a variety of profiles. (RJC)

Reports a study that examined the influence of authoritarianism on the formation of behavioral intentions by female college students. High authoritarians took subjective norms less into account relative to low authoritarians, providing support for the theory that personal and subjective norms can be distinguished empirically. (LS)

Cluster analysis was performed on the adaptive behavior scores of 2 samples of 200 institutionalized mentally retarded individuals. Three clusters were found to be stable across clustering methods, subject samples, and time points 3 years apart. Cluster membership was meaningfully associated with demographic characteristics and neurological and…

In the face of increasing cultural diversity, educators need new ways of understanding how children think. The theory of multiple intelligences provides a means for distinguishing the many ways children have to solve problems and create products, identify cognitive strengths, and group students according to complementary intelligences. (MSE)

Examined Swedish children's inhibition behavior using mothers' and psychologists' ratings of inhibition at age 18 and 24 months to predict later ratings through age 16 years. Prediction was more reliable for children rated as very inhibited or very uninhibited than for those in nonextreme group through age six. Only for inhibited girls did early…

Hypothesized that individual differences in 81 sixth-grade boys' self-restraint would serve as a mediator between family factors in preadolescence and sons' delinquent behavior 4 years later. General family functioning at preadolescence, independent of other scores, predicted boys' level of self-restraint four years later. (MDM)

The time may be ripe for the fields of mathematics education, special education, and cognitive psychology to converge, with their respective focuses on mathematical problem solving, individual differences among students, and analysis of cognitive processes. Four articles on learning disabilities in mathematics are introduced, and a research agenda…

In 2 experiments involving 271 elementary and middle-school students with greater and lesser writing skills, components of the writing-translating process were examined. Skilled writers showed more fluent sentence-generation processes and were faster on lexical decision-making tasks. Fluent translating may help reduce the working-memory load…

Presents case studies of three high-achieving learners who demonstrated a variety of motivations and strategy uses according to their individual differences. The primary focus of the study is on the strategies employed by learners during their school days in their native Germany. The three studies demonstrate a wide range of strategy uses and…

Examines group and individual differences arising from strategy instruction. Finds support for strategy instruction for at-risk students. Finds also that students' motivation can influence their use of the instruction they receive. Raises critical questions regarding the role of motivation in strategy instruction and use. (RS)