The present research investigated whether 13.5-month-old infants would attribute to an actor a disposition to perform a recurring action, and would then use this information to predict which of two new objects--one that could be used to perform the action and one that could not--the actor would grasp next. During familiarization, the infants…

The interactions of 24-, 30-, and 36-month-old children and their mothers reading two initially unfamiliar books were observed three times over a 2-week period. Coding characterized both the content and the role of their utterances as they discussed the stories. Utterance content depended on child age but changed little with increasing story…

In two separate studies, the authors examined fifth graders' preference for authentic and arranged versions of world music recordings, the relationship of those preference ratings to familiarity, and teachers' ability to predict student preferences. In the first study, intact classes of fifth-grade students were randomly assigned to an authentic…

This study reports analyses and findings from a public opinion survey designed to explore beliefs about domestic violence (DV) -- what it is, when it is against the law, and how prevalent it is. The project interviewed 1,200 residents from six New York communities. The analyses reveal substantial first hand and second hand experience with DV and…

Preschool children's listening time responses to free versus directed listening activities were compared. For the free condition, children were instructed just to "listen as long as you would like." The directed condition was a written task designed to focus attention on specific aspects of the music and give children something concrete to do…

Studies of patients with category-specific agnosia (CSA) have given rise to multiple theories of object recognition, most of which assume the existence of a stable, abstract semantic memory system. We applied an episodic view of memory to questions raised by CSA in a series of studies examining normal observers' recall of newly learned attributes…

Screeners at airport security checkpoints perform an important categorization task in which they search for threat items in complex x-ray images. But little is known about how the processes of categorization stand up to visual complexity. The authors filled this research gap with screening tasks in which participants searched for members of target…

Childers and Tomasello (2001) found that training 2 1/2-year-olds on the English transitive construction greatly improves their performance on a post-test in which they must use novel verbs in that construction. In the current study, we replicated Childers and Tomasello's finding, but using a much lower frequency of transitive verbs and models in…

This article reports on a project that challenges students to socialize with students from a variety of groups. In the observance of "Mix It Up at Lunch Day," students sit somewhere new, with someone new, in the cafeterias. More than 3,000 schools accepted the challenge as a way to bridge social boundaries in their schools.

The word "technology" has evolved through several different meanings during the recent history of education. In 1985, the American Industrial Arts Association changed its name to the International Technology Education Association. This change reflected dissatisfaction with traditional "shop" courses, designed to prepare…

We examined how children with and without oral language (word-finding) difficulties (WFD) perform on oral reading (OR) versus silent reading recognition (SRR) tasks when reading the same words and how lexical factors influenced OR accuracy, error patterns, and nature of miscues. Primary-grade students were administered an experimental reading…

Having grown up in an age of rapidly developing electronic communication technology, today's students come to higher education with high levels of comfort and familiarity with computer-mediated communication (CMC, hereafter). The students' level of comfort with CMC, coupled with CMC's promises of enabling supplemental class discussion as well as…

Instructional strategies for successfully teaching concepts are found throughout the instructional design literature. These strategies primarily consist of presenting learners with definitions, examples, and non-examples. While examples are important presentation instruments, theorist suggests that examples should not be re-used in the assessment…

Children often perseverate, repeating prior behaviors when inappropriate. This work tested the roles of verbal labels and stimulus novelty in such perseveration. Three-year-old children sorted cards by one rule and were then instructed to switch to a second rule. In a basic condition, cards had familiar shapes and colors and both rules were stated…

The goal of the current research was to assess whether children can make strategic use of morphological relations among words to spell. French-speaking children in Grade 4 spelled three word types: (a) phonological words that had regular phoneme-grapheme correspondences, (b) morphological words that had silent consonant endings for which a…