Presents five experiments that examine the ability of first graders, fourth graders, and adults to make causal inferences that explain how an unexpected and inconsistent "outcome" follows from an initial premise in a story. Results indicate that referential and causal coherence are empirically separable and should be distinguished…

Generated a taxonomy of situations most likley to lead deviant children to experience social difficulties. Study 1 administered a survey to teachers of rejected (N=45) and adaptive (N=39) children. Found six main situation types. Study 2 tested 15 items within the six situations. The items differentiated the two groups. (BH)

Directives, social conversation, on-task play, and positive, negative, nonsense, and task-related verbalizations of preschool-aged and school-aged peer dyads were observed in a laboratory playroom in the presence or absence of observers. Results revealed that the frequency of all of the behaviors sampled, except positive verbalizations, decreased…

Examined developmental patterns in children's attempts to regulate their expressive behavior in a mildly conflictful situation where they expected to receive a desirable reward but in fact received an undesirable one. Major findings included significant age by sex interactions. (Author/RH)

Third-grade children were taught efficient use of a self-monitoring strategy in preparing for recall. One group was trained on both free and serial recall; others on only one of the two tasks. A posttest was given one week after training, and a follow-up test of some children was given nine months later. (Author/BE)

Demonstrates a training technique for improving the referential performance of young children and for obtaining generalization of this training. Findings on generalization suggest that further investigation should reveal practical applications of the method for the classroom and clinic. (RH)

While six- and nine-year-olds were as good as adults in distinguishing what they did from what they saw someone else do, children had particular trouble across a range of actions in distinguishing actual from imagined doing. All subjects recalled actions according to performer; organization by person categories reduced clustering based on action…

Explores the role of premature cognitive closure in the development of inferential reasoning among 62 children aged 7, 9, and 12 years through two studies. Results indicate that despite a strong tendency to close on single alternatives, most children correctly assigned nonzero probabilities to each of the possible alternatives. (RJC)

What is science for a child? How do children learn about science and how to do science? Drawing on a vast array of work from neuroscience to classroom observation, "Taking Science to School" provides a comprehensive picture of what we know about teaching and learning science from kindergarten through eighth grade. By looking at a broad range of…

An experiment was conducted to test the hypothesis that the remediation of negative emotion will be most effective when the remedial procedure matches the experience or cognition that induced the negative state. Other hypotheses examined were (1) that negative states induced by cognitive reflection related to the self would be resistant to…

Little information has been generated regarding the convergent and discriminant validity of measures used to investigate children's ethnic attitudes. The present study explores these aspects of validity by examining the relationships among three measures of ethnic attitude and between these measures and two measures of egocentrism. Attitude…

To investigate the relationship between perceived self-competence and other variables affecting the successful adjustment and achievement of students, 400 fourth through seventh graders were surveyed using the Perceived Competence Scale for Children (PCSC), the Revised Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale (RCMAS), which consists of two scales,…

First-, third-, fifth-, and sixth-grade children were administered 20 relational reasoning problems in which they had to deduce the possible sizes of one item relative to two others on the basis of a visual comparison and a written clue. Dramatic differences were observed between fifth- and sixth-grade children. Corrective feedback improved…

Investigates multiple trends in perceptual development of kindergarten, second grade, and fifth grade children who performed a speeded card sorting task with spatially integrated versus spatially separated dimensions. Results strongly support the hypothesis that there are developmental differences in perceived structure as well as ability to…

Study examines the role of figural characteristics in the development of pictorial inferences. Results indicate that although the pictorial inferences drawn by kindergarteners are heavily influenced by figural representations, such figural dependency cannot account for all of the observed developmental differences. (Author/RWB)