Two crucial factors in teaching spelling are the teacher's understanding of the material to be learned and the teacher's understanding of the nature of the learner. Psycholinguistics is relevant to both the material and the learner. In teaching spelling, it is possible to draw insights from behavioral and cognitive psychology as well as from Noam…

In 1974, the Facilitating Educational Achievement through Telecommunications (FEATT) project began a study to test the efficacy of specially produced video cassettes to teach parents of severely handicapped children how to instruct their children in basic psychomotor skills. Fifty families in Northern Indiana agreed to field test the tapes.…

This study explored the relationship between locus of control, Ss skill/chance perceptions, and verifiability of feedback on Ss decision time in a letter elimination task. Ss were 72 male and 72 female undergraduates, divided into groups of internals and externals based on results from Rotter's I-E scale. In a letter elimination task, several…

The scores of 79 second-grade pupils on the Ravens Colored Progressive Matrices and the Bender Gestalt were factor-analyzed using six different factor-analytic procedures. Sex, age, and vocabulary test scores were included in the analysis as marker variables. The original factor solutions were subjected to oblique transformation and the…

The shaping of human motor development is demonstrated by the orderly sequence of events which occur throughout the individual's development process. Muscular strength and proficiency in gross motor skills improve with advancing chronological age throughout childhood and adolescence, with sex differences in performance tending to favor males. (JN)

Provides an overview of presentations that were included in the Medical Symposium at the 1998 Learning Disabilities Association conference. The symposium addressed vestibular control and eye movement, postural sway and balance, cerebellar dysfunction, the role of the frontal lobe, developmental coordination disorder, and sensory integration…

This study compared the skills performance of 60 children, ages 3 to 5, with speech and language delays on the Peabody Developmental Motor Scales (PDMS) with that of national norms on the PDMS. It found that the children with speech and language delays performed the PDMS gross motor skills significantly lower than the norm at each age level. The…

This research paper reports on testing the hypothesis that music and spatial task performance are causally related. Two complementary studies are presented that replicate and explore previous findings. One study of college students showed that listening to a Mozart sonata induces subsequent short-term spatial reasoning facilitation and tested the…

This study examined the electrophysiological differences between baseline EEG frequencies and EEG frequencies obtained while listening to music stimuli. The experimental group comprised 22 children, ages 4 to 6 years old, who received special music instruction twice a week for 25 minutes for 7 weeks. The control group received no music…

Research on learning styles has shown that students learn better when teachers plan class learning activities to fit students' learning styles. This paper describes three "ways of knowing" and discusses the role they play in "knowing the culture" of a school. The first part relates ways of knowing to the usual three domains of learning--cognitive,…

A description is given of an ongoing collaborative research effort consisting of a series of studies with 3- to 5-year-old children, designed for the purpose of: (1) identifying factors contributing to motor learning/performance during the development years, i.e., psychological, sociological, and experiential variables; (2) determining the…

In a study of beginning collegiate volleyball players, two classes were assigned to a traditional approach, and two to a Motor Processes Approach. Following 8 weeks of instruction, the Motor Processes classes were significantly better on the set, serve, and pass, and were more knowledgeable. Students indicated that they believed they learned equal…

A study was conducted to investigate (1) the relationship between mothers' and fathers' attitudes about education at the time of their children's kindergarten entry, and (2) the relationship between these parent attitudes and children's kindergarten adjustment. Subjects were drawn from the kindergarten rosters of four suburban elementary schools…

There are four phases to the Deerfield High School (Chicago, Illinois) sex-fair performance evaluation system: (1) a point system allowing students to control 50 percent of their grades through participation and attendance; (2) an ongoing evaluation procedure concerned with determining the contributions of various units of instruction (all…

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…