The influence of three variables on response to undecidability was studied: (1) dual- versus single-solution rules; (2) nature of the choice contrast, and (3) presence or absence of additional information to resolve the undecidability. Participants were college students and third, fourth, and fifth grade elementary school students. (RH)

Three studies demonstrated that adults and children provide nonconservation-of-weight responses to misdirecting questions. Findings underscore the importance of linguistic pragmatics, conflict with recent claims that adults believe in the necessity of certain types of Piagetian logic, and support earlier findings suggesting that contextual cues…

Investigated effects of changing the level of motor planning demands in simple drawing tasks for which children aged 5-11 years completed or copied squares and diamonds. Results were consistent with previous studies. Low planning demands resulted in less difference between square and diamond performance than did tasks demanding higher planning.…

Explores strategies used by fifth-grade teachers who exemplified three different classroom orientations (learning-oriented, work-oriented, or work-avoidance) toward student motivation and learning. Raises questions for future research and highlights strategies that support motivation to learn. (NH)

Involving second, fourth, sixth, eighth, and tenth graders and undergraduates, three experiments evaluated the prediction that representations of knowledge of the weeks and months of the year develop from a verbal-list stage to a stage at which image representations are present. Results are interpreted as supporting the two-stage model and appear…

Reports on two experiments that investigated sex differences in the use of organization strategies in free recall with categorizable and unrelated word lists across age in elementary school. Shows sex differences were pronounced across the ages tested and consistent with principles of strategy development, with males showing a developmental lag in…

Presents four experiments comparing the perceptual span in second-, fourth-, and sixth-grade readers and skilled adult readers. Suggests that the size of perceptual span is variable and influenced by text difficulty. Concludes that the size of perceptual span does not cause slow reading rates in beginning readers. (Author/DR)

Investigates effects of perceptual salience and specific orientation values on 16 kindergarten and fourth-grade children executing a speeded sorting task. Kindergarten results supported the cognitive processing prediction that orientation sorting times would vary as a function of condition, but no differences were obtained for the fourth-grade…

Describes four experiments to show that the effects of item-specific and relational encoding emphasis on recall vary with the retrieval context for both young children and adults. (HOD)

Tests the hypothesis that habituation of attention to irrelevant information can account for within-task improvement in selective attention--that children who are preexposed to stimuli that will later be irrelevant in a speeded classification task will experience less interference than children not given the opportunity to habituate. (HOD)

Examines (1) the relationship between children's scores on the Home Observation for Measurement of Environment (HOME) Inventory and their achievement test scores, and (2) the relationship between children's intervening home environments and their school achievement. Data were gathered from 37 normal first-grade children and their families.…

A total of 40 socially rejected, low-achieving fourth-graders were randomly assigned to one of four clinical intervention conditions: academic skills training (AS); social skills training (SS); a combinations of AS and SS training; and control. Achievement and sociometric scores were obtained at the end of third, fourth, and fifth grades. AS…

Evaluated whether age differences in children's generosity result from increasing altruistic motivation or increasing susceptibility to experimenter influence strategies. A total of 282 first, third, and fifth graders voted on how to spend a gift of money under one of five instructional sets--three levels of experimenter influence, peer influence,…

Examines the role of modeling and social reciprocity in the regulation of young boys' aggressive actions. Tested in pairs, 100 first- and second-grade students were assigned to five experimental conditions differing in whether one or both boys saw a film depicting aggression directed toward persons or toward inanimate objects. (RH)

A developmental model of story liking predicts that (1) reader identification increases with greater perceived similarity between character and reader; (2) increased identification leads to greater suspense; (3) liking of story outcome is a joint function of character valence and outcome valence; and (4) overall liking of story increases with…