Compares the cognitive representation of number of 24 American, 25 Chinese, 24 Japanese, and 40 Korean first-graders, and 20 Korean kindergartners. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean children preferred to use a construction of tens and ones to show numbers, whereas English-speaking children preferred to use a collection of units. (RJC)

Uses a sample of 33 second graders and 34 fourth graders to examine the tendency of children to perceive illusory correlations leading to greater recall of events that confirm sex stereotypes. Finds that both age groups perceived illusory correlations, giving the highest frequency estimates to traditional stimuli. (FMW)

Deficiencies in social competence constitute a significant problem for aggressive children. As a result, these children often experience difficulty interacting with peers in socially acceptable ways. Such problems are particularly exacerbated in the schoolyard, where rules are less defined and low levels of supervision prevail. The present study…

School transition is a critical life event for many children. However, the effects of school transition on children's stress experiences reported in the literature have been inconsistent. The present study with 564 third- to sixth-graders compared the changes in experienced stress level and in somatic and psychological symptoms during the…

This study investigated the influence of instrumental music instruction on the academic achievement of fifth grade students. The sample consisted of 270 fifth grade students (135 boys and 135 girls) located in a southwestern Kansas school district in a city of approximately 20,000 people. The independent variables considered were: instrumental…

A pilot study examined the effects of improved breakfast nutrition on students' academic achievement. Participants were 142 intermediate school children who usually ate breakfast in school. All children were given the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Tests, Form 1, Levels A-D, and were ranked according to their total reading scores. The experimental and…

An investigation was made into causes for decreasing performance on the Common Entrance Examination, a test for admission into secondary schools, by candidates in Borno State, Nigeria. It had been noted that performance had begun to worsen after the introduction of universal primary education in 1976. To gather data addressing the issue, probable…

This study examined the effects of specific motivational dimensions and self-perceptions of a group of 47 urban black fourth and fifth grade students on attendance and academic achievement. Each student's responses to a measure of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and a self-perception inventory were compared to each other and to his or her…

Geographic mobility has a negative effect on a student's overall academic achievement. Data were drawn from Denver (Colorado) Public Schools (DPS), a multiethnic urban school system of over 60,000 students of whom 58,400 are enrolled in grades K through 12. Each year, students at all grade levels are administered the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills…

This paper examines work in eliciting conceptions of light and vision that are held by naive learners and about some promising instructional strategies that emerge from this work. Naive learners are defined as subjects that have not had formal exposure to the physics of light, particularly elementary school children who were interviewed in the…

This study assesses 7- to 12-year-old children's abilities to understand the figural and metrical aspects of rhythm. Tasks were developed to assess children's ability to (1) make figural and metrical descriptions, (2) interpret figural and metrical descriptions, (3) produce the metrical hierarchy through drumming, (4) describe the metrical…

Using five metamemory question types and the Counting Span Test (CST), this research investigated the effects of metamemory task demands, and the relationship of the amount of information one can hold in working memory to metamemory question performance. One hundred twenty kindergarten, first, third, and fifth grade children served as subjects.…

When first, fourth, and fifth grade speakers played a referential communication game with a fictitious listener, they were more likely to give redundant messages to listeners with whom they had no common shared experience or to strangers than to listeners with whom they had shared a previous experience. (RH)

Three types of metalinguistic awareness and their relation to socioeconomic status, vocabulary, reading readiness skills, and reading acheivement were longitudinally studied in a sample of 40 kindergartners and 43 first graders. The three metalinguistic tasks were highly interrelated until the effects of oral language comprehension or vocabulary…

Training paradigms were used to pinpoint key obstacles to covariation judgment accuracy among children, adolescents, and adults. The majority of junior high subjects, even when given training, failed to learn the rule. Fourth through eighth grade subjects could be taught to compare two sums in the sum-of-diagonals rule. (RH)