The Starkweather Social Conformity Test is a research instrument designed to measure conforming and nonconforming behavior by providing the young child with opportunities to make choices in a situation in which he can follow a model or respond freely according to his own preferences. The test discriminates between compulsive conformists or…

Studying the validity of the Developmental Indicators for the Assessment of Learning (DIAL), 53 kindergartners took the DIAL before school entrance and then had their Slosson Intelligence Test scores and Metropolitan Readiness Tests monitored for the school year. Preschool screening programs and their relation to the DIAL are discussed. (CE)

The effects of play-like, verbal-feedback, and nonverbal-feedback testing conditions on three creative ability measures and the reliabilities of those measures were studied using 175 lower-class preschool children. The creativity measures were found to be largely unaffected by variations in testing conditions; but at the same time, different forms…

The Starkweather Target Game is designed to measure preschool children's willingness to try difficult tasks independent of ability. The game consists of a box-shaped target which responds, when the target is hit by a rolled ball, somewhat like a jack-in-a-box. When the bull's eye is hit, the lid opens and a surprise picture appears. After being…

Three hypotheses were tested regarding the attribution of causation for successful behavior by kindergarten children: (1) self concept--children with high self esteem make internal attributions and those with low self esteem make external attributions; (2) locus of control (LOC)--children with internal LOC make internal attributions and those with…

As a measure of gender identity constancy, The Boy-Girl Identity Task was administered in both Year 1 and Year 2 of the ETS-Head Start Longitudinal Study. The instrument consists of two parallel tasks, each with five items. In Task I, a pricture and name of a girl and presented to the subjects. Items consist of hypothetical changes introduced by…

Test validity was studied in nine subtests of a kindergarten screening battery used to predict reading comprehension for children up to five years after entering kindergarten. The independent variables were kindergarteners' scores on the: (1) Otis-Lennon Mental Ability Test; (2) Bender Visual Motor Gestalt Test; (3) Detroit Tests of Learning…

An investigation of the continuing development of infants involved in a program of enriched group care is presented. The 30 advantaged infants had working mothers, and the 9 disadvantaged infants had nonworking mothers. In the original study, they were enrolled in private day care and involved in a program of total environmental care and parent…

The Children's Auditory Discrimination Inventory (CADI) was used in the longitudinal study to evaluate the child's ability to identify, between two pictures that have been given oral word equivalents, the picture that represents the orally presented stimulus word. The task, which takes 10 minutes, uses 38 cards with two pictures on each and 38…

The Berry Developmental Test of Visual Motor Integration was devised as a measure of the degree to which visual perception and motor behavior are integrated in young children, measured by the copying of geometric forms. In this study, 64 three-year-old children were tested individually to investigate (1) whether there is a correlation between…

The Open Field Test was used to assess variables that might not be manifested in a more standard testing situation. In this test, the child was shown 10 standard play objects in the room, and was told to do anything he wished with the toys. The tester initiated no interaction with the child and responded minimally to any overture made by the…

The Preschool Racial Attitude Measure (PRAM) and the Comfortable Interpersonal Distance Scale (CID) were concurrently administered in counterbalanced order to 60 black and white five and six-year olds to establish whether a relationship existed between assessed racial bias and the interpersonal distance ascribed to figures by race. No relationship…

The Johns Hopkins Perceptual Test, a brief measure of intelligence in children, requires the child to choose a form identical to a standard. It consists of 3 practice and 30 test items, all involving black geometric figures printed on white cards. There is one booklet for stimulus cards and one for response cards. The child is presented with a…

An adaptation of a technique devised by Mischel (1958) was used in the longitudinal study to measure delay of gratification. Adaptations involved (1) asking the child to identify the larger of two pieces of candy to facilitate comprehension of the rewards, (2) specifying a standard time limit for receipt of the delayed reward which would be…