Acquiring the norm of altruism is conceived as a three-step process involving presocialization, awareness that others value altruistic behavior, and internalization of the norm. The present studies investigated how first-, second-, and third-grade children attain the second step. Attainment, occurring around second grade, was a function of…

Tests 107 kindergarten and first grade children to study the order-irrelevance principle. Willingness to arbitrarily assign tags is a developmentally less sophisticated ability than--and hence does not necessarily imply--an ability to predict that differently ordered counts produce the same cardinal designation. (Author)

Examines motivational processes within different goal/reward structures, i.e., competitive, cooperative, and individualistic. Reviews the results of several studies of teacher and student perceptions of personal ability and success and failure. Discusses educational implications of the authors' conclusion that alternative goal structures lead to…

Two studies involving five- and nine-year-old children examined the effects of planning with a partner as well as the relation of collaborative planning to subsequent solo planning. Results suggest that cognitive gains resulting from joint problem solving between children and adults or peers may be more likely with shared task responsibility. (RH)

Studies the development of early drawing in 129 Chinese children aged 7 to 12 and 118 English children aged 7 to 11. Results indicate that similarities are more apparent than differences in children's drawings. (RJC)

Describes the development of a scale to measure environmental attitudes of grade school children. The scale items reflect children's knowledge of environmental issues, and the scale uses an age-appropriate format. The scale's 25 items were selected through item analysis from a larger pool of items. Discusses potential use for research and…

This paper investigated six to nine year old children's ability to use contractive and possessive apostrophes, the effects of type and token frequency, and the effect of teaching on this ability. Apostrophes provide an interesting opportunity to examine the basis of frequency effects in rule inference, as type and token frequencies dissociate in…

To refine methodology, a study was made of how 52 first-, third-, and fifth-grade boys and girls understood feelings in themselves and their parents. It was expected that older children would use more complex criteria than younger children and that differences would result from the number of points of view subjects had to consider to answer a…

A total of 96 students (16 males and 16 females, chosen randomly from each of the first, fourth, and seventh grades of a grade school and a middle school,) allocated rewards in response to stimuli representing pairs of children differing in work output and effort. Stimulus materials consisted of: (1) a booklet containing nine drawings representing…

This article discusses the idea that overt verbalization helps to develop children's self-regulated learning of cognitive skills. It points out that (1) verbalization can enhance children's attention to task-relevant features; (2) as a type of rehearsal, verbalization may improve coding, storage, and retention of material, and thereby facilitate…

Richards, Gaver, and Golicz (1984) found that, in contrast to peers whose grades were accurately predicted from performance on aptitude tests, both extremely underachieving and extremely overachieving fourth-graders had negative academic attitudes. The present study aimed to replicate and extend these findings. Subjects in the replication study…

Two experiments investigated relationships between state anxiety, memory processes, and children's performance on problem-solving tasks. Participants were second and sixth graders in a private elementary school in Redlands, California. In both experiments, subjects responded to three training and eight test problems presented in the introtact…

Developmental differences in the relative salience of features in concept representations in semantic memory and their contributions to differences in cued recall were examined in two experiments. Subjects were second graders, fifth graders, and college students. Results showed that recall varied with feature salience, with salience greatest for…

To investigate affective and dispositional factors in the motivation of children's helping, 60 children ranging from preschool to sixth grade were observed in laboratory distress incidents. Results indicated that helping tended to be positively correlated with positive affect and negatively correlated with negative and neutral affect. (Author/RH)

This review presents evidence that student nonverbal behavior may be an important component in the formation of teachers' impressions, attitudes, beliefs, and reciprocal behavioral expressions. Results of the studies are considered within the research on impression formation, communication theory, and classroom activity and participation…