Reviews the literature on the effect of prior knowledge and text familiarity on document comprehension and usability. Discusses current methods for assessing subjects' topic familiarity. Presents an empirically based method for effectively assessing topic familiarity. Explains that the method includes use of two subject groups and reliance on…

Children between 7 and 13 years of age were presented with scenarios for which they predicted a result derived from 2 or 3 interacting variables. The effect of the interaction of variables was observed for all ages in familiar scenarios, but the effect diminished in scenarios of unfamiliar activity. (BC)

Examined 18-month olds' intermodal and verbal knowledge about gender. Presented photos of adults or children paired with a female or male voice, or with gender labels. With adult pictures, subjects spent more time looking at pictures with matching voices than at those with mismatched voices. With children's pictures, subjects failed to match faces…

Investigates the effect of orientation of depth cues on the magnitude of perceived depth in pictures. Finds that, for each test drawing, the orientation with the far point above the near point provided greater depth perception than any other orientation. Discusses possible contributions of observer experience and height of visual field. (DSK)

Information presented concurrently and redundantly to 2 or more senses (intersensory redundancy) has been shown to recruit attention and promote perceptual learning of amodal stimulus properties in animal embryos and human infants. This study examined whether the facilitative effect of intersensory redundancy also extends to the domain of memory.…

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…