Two lines of argument have been advanced to support the assertion that schooling makes little difference in the efforts of low status people to achieve equality or a fair chance at survival. One says that the genetic inferiority of certain races makes them incapable of benefitting from schooling. Although there is no hard biological evidence to…

Guidance for career development must be concerned not so much with helping young people learn how to earn a living as with learning how to live a life. In the early part of this century, certain conditions and attitudes prevailed which influenced the character of the career guidance profession. However, these conditions and attitudes are no longer…

This literature review surveyed and evaluated investigations conducted in nursery schools and preschools in order to provide better understanding of the nature of early intervention and its effects on young children. Studies are described in terms of methodology and outcomes, with focus on enrichment programs and compensatory training programs…

Arguments for the use of sequential ordinal scales in the observation of infants and young children are based on the tendency of traditional psychometric assessment to distract investigators from discerning structural and hierarchical aspects of development. Norm-referenced testing focuses on interindividual comparisons rather than developmental…

This chapter deals with three difficulties that inhibit the author's addressing the assigned question--what new theories, practices, concepts, or research in the natural sciences provide new insight into the affective domain? The first difficulty is that no striking discoveries have been made and that what is known about the relationship of…

Investigates the relationship between students' previous school knowledge about a particular natural phenomenon and the teaching of a science lesson about that phenomenon. A group of 198 secondary school students from Sierra Leone, West Africa, and 21 junior high students from the United States participated. (HM)

Discusses the influence of external environments on the functioning of families as contexts for child development. Describes studies on the interaction of genetics and environment, on relationships between the family and hospital care, day care, peers, schools, parental employment and support networks, the community, and major transition life…

Reading ability, symbol-processing speed, and spatial reasoning ability were examined in families with reading disabled children and in control families. For both types of families, comparable moderate familial influences were found, which also accounted for phenotypic correlations between traits. Multivariate path analysis and other statistical…

Separate dimensions of infant cognition were compared with parental general- and specific-cognitive abilities for 182 adoptive and 164 nonadoptive families. More parent-offspring resemblance was present when 24- rather than 12-month Bayley factors were used. Bayley factors were more related to parental g than to specific abilities. (Author/RD)

"The Bell Curve" by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray has generated enormous debate as a result of its claim that there is a connection between race and intelligence. The essays of this collection respond to "The Bell Curve" in various ways. Taken together, the following offer an antidote to a work of dubious premises…

The writings of Abraham Maslow are analyzed to determine the meaning of the psychological term "self-actualization." After pointing out that self-actualization is a rare quality and that it has little to do with formal education, the author concludes that the concept has little practical relevance for teacher education. (PP)

Changing ideas on intelligence testing and the heritability of intelligence are followed through a fifty-year period. Common criticisms of intelligence tests are examined, but it is concluded that intellectual tests will continue to be of value in diagnosing strengths and weaknesses, particularly of exceptional children. (Editor)

Israeli Arab- and Jewish-educated children were given perceptual exploration tasks to test the effects of language on directionality in reading and writing habits. (Author/SS)

Alice Rossi's 1977 article, "A Biosocial Perspective on Parenting," considered relationships among biology, the family, other social structures, and feminism. In this article, Rossi, together with a panel of sociologists and psychologists researching dimensions of physiological/psychological links to behavior, comment on the original…

Four studies in child development show that children socialize parents as much as parents socialize children. Child development is a function of biological maturation and child-environment interaction. The most important determinants of resiliency are caregiver quality and socioeconomic status. Implications for camp are discussed, the most…