The linguistic, cultural, and ethnic mixture in many countries, including the United States, is changing rapidly and varies significantly from such old standbys as "Johnny Appleseed" or "Dick and Jane." Learning to communicate effectively in a new language involves gaining familiarity with the present-day culture of the country in which one…

The influences of domain-specific meteorological knowledge and general visual-spatial abilities on the comprehension of simple weather maps were examined in a regression-based study involving a sample of participants with relatively low meteorological knowledge and in an experiment involving a contrast between samples of higher- and…

Young infants have repeatedly been shown to be slower than older infants to shift fixation from a midline stimulus to a peripheral stimulus. This is generally thought to reflect maturation of the neural substrates that mediate the disengagement of attention, but this developmental difference may also be attributable to young infants' slower…

As countries continue to invest in information and communication technologies (ICT) and they become even more common in the workplace, there is an increasing demand for schools to produce technologically literate students. This report presents results from the "Programme for International Student Assessment" (PISA) 2003, and examines how…

Like all probabilistic decisions, recognition memory judgments are based on inferences about the strength and quality of stimulus familiarity. In recent articles, B. W. A. Whittlesea and J. Leboe (2000; J. Leboe & B. W. A. Whittlesea, 2002) proposed that such memory decisions entail various heuristics, similar to well-known heuristics in overt…

In this study, we developed and validated a questionnaire to assess teachers' perceptions of their actual and preferred school-level environment, investigated whether teachers involved with Outcomes-Based Education (OBE) perceive the school-level environment differently from those who are not, and investigated factors in the school-level…

Readers construct at least 2 interrelated mental representations when they comprehend a text: a textbase and a situation model. Two experiments were conducted with recognition memory to examine how domain knowledge and text coherence influence readers' textbase and situation-model representations. In Experiment 1, participants made remember-know…

In this article second language (L2) knowledge of Dutch grammatical gender is investigated. Adult speakers of German, English and a Romance language (French, Italian or Spanish) were investigated to explore the role of transfer in learning the Dutch grammatical gender system. In the first language (L1) systems, German is the most similar to Dutch…

The main objective of this study was to identify prospective science teachers' conceptions on basic astronomical phenomena. A questionnaire consisting of nine open-ended questions was administered to 327 prospective science teachers. The questionnaire was constructed after extensive review of the literature and took into consideration the reported…

Explored the effect of person familiarity and parental involvement on 3.5-month-old infants' sensitivity to the dynamic emotion expressions of others. Found that infants looked differentially at mothers' expressions but not at those of fathers or unfamiliar adults, and that parent-child involvement significantly influenced infants' developing…

Elicited imitation was used to assess 21-month-olds' recall of familiar-canonical, familiar-reversed, novel-causal, and novel-arbitrary event sequences. Reversed sequences were reproduced in modeled and corrected canonical order; other sequences were reproduced in modeled order. (BC)

Two studies examined the relationship between phonological sensitivity and 5-year-olds' acquisition of new words that systematically differed in the familiarity of their sound structures. Found that phonological sensitivity was related to pair-associated learning of phonologically unfamiliar, but not familiar, words. Following phonological…

Four experiments examined links and differences between children's copying line diagrams and drawing solid objects. Findings suggest that emphasis on order of line copying improves copying performance because line-to-line matching is an important element of the skill, whereas this does not aid drawing of the solid object, in which focus is…

Surveyed the extent to which a sample of academic staff at Monash University in Australia are familiar with general intellectual property concepts and the provisions of their university's intellectual property statute. Found a level of ignorance in this area that may require attention. (EV)

Reviews research that demonstrates that children in the one- to two-year age range are able to remember specific events over weeks and months. Recall is influenced by what young children are asked to remember, the number of times they experience events, and the availability of cues or reminders. (SLD)