Studied predictors of social dominance and the effects of social dominance on the play behavior of 16 young children 1 to 3 years old. Observed multiple interactions with multiple partners to explore individual-level effects and effects due to individual-partner interactions. Found support for expectations that social dominance mediates…

Examined the connection between gender differences in examinees' familiarity, interest, and negative emotional reactions to items on the College Board's Advanced Placement Psychology Examination and the items' differential item functioning (DIF). Gender differences for a sample of 717 students for the 3 variables were substantially related to the…

A study of graduate students examined how learners process videotaped materials on familiar and unfamiliar topics. Analysis of interviews suggested that all participants interpreted the content of the videotape relative to topics with which they were familiar. In their responses, those familiar with topics offered more inferences, while those…

Two experiments used paired-comparisons to investigate 3-month olds' recognition of dynamic visual events after various retention intervals. Results indicated a changing pattern of attentional preferences over time consistent with models of infant recognition memory in which novelty, familiarity, and null preferences are considered conjointly and…

Examined how Japanese 2- and 4-year-olds assigned meaning to novel nouns associated with familiar and unfamiliar animals and inanimate objects. Found that in the absence of useful information from syntax, the 2-year-olds were able to fast map a noun to its meaning by elegantly coordinating word-learning biases and other available sources of…

For students to develop an understanding of functions, they must have opportunities to solve problems that require them to transfer between algebraic, numeric, and graphic representations (transfer problems). Research has confirmed student difficulties with certain types of transfer problems and has suggested instructional factors as a possible…

This study investigates factors affecting the degree of novice physics students application of the naive impetus theory. Six hundred and fourteen first-year university engineering physics students answered the Force Concept Inventory as a pre-test for their calculus-based course. We examined the degree to which students consistently applied the…

Transfer students represent an increasingly important group in four-year schools. To date, only limited information on the research abilities and library needs of this group has been reported. A survey of information needs and skills of incoming transfer students at Western Washington University (WWU) showed that while many reported some…

Two studies investigated the relationship between working memory capacity (WMC), adult age, and the resolution of conflict between familiarity and recollection in short-term recognition tasks. Experiment 1 showed a specific deficit of young adults with low WMC in rejecting intrusion probes (i.e., highly familiar probes) in a modified Sternberg…

In 3 experiments, young and older adults studied lists of unrelated word pairs and were given confidence-rated item and associative recognition tests. Several different models of recognition were fit to the confidence-rating data using techniques described by S. Macho (2002, 2004). Concordant with previous findings, item recognition data were best…

The present study investigated the language familiarity hypothesis formulated by Mackay [(1970). How does language familiarity influence stuttering under delayed auditory feedback? "Perceptual and Motor Skills", 30, 655-669] that bilinguals speak faster and stutter less under delayed auditory feedback (DAF) when speaking their more…

This lesson plan contains four activities based on the theme of newspapers and journalism. It includes a lesson to familiarize students with newspapers, journalistic writing, interviewing, and creating a class newspaper. The activities can be used as individual lessons or a larger project of creating a class newspaper.

English as a second language (ESL) teachers have long noted that native speakers of Arabic exhibit exceptional difficulty with English reading comprehension (e.g., Thompson-Panos & Thomas-Ruzic, 1983). Most existing work in this area has looked to higher level aspects of reading such as familiarity with discourse structure and cultural knowledge…

The International Resilience Project was intended to determine the multidimensional, reciprocal, and dynamic factors--and relationships of factors--that parents, teachers, caregivers, and children themselves use to promote resilience in children. The samples were 589 children and their caregivers from 14 countries: Lithuania, Russia, Costa Rica,…

An angles teaching sequence was designed, in which students were guided to abstract a general concept from physical activities with concrete materials. The three design principles used were familiarity, similarity recognition, and reification. The resulting teaching sequence was tested in a field study involving 25 teachers of Grades 3-4. The data…