Proportion compatible manipulations are often used to index strategic processes in selective attention tasks. Here, a subtle confound in proportion compatible manipulations is considered. Specifically, as the proportion of compatible trials increases, the ratio of complete repetitions and complete alternations to partial repetitions increases on…

Involving children three and four years of age, studies examined the basis for the difficulty of discriminating between left-right orientations of a shape in standard two-choice task. It was concluded that difficulty of left-right judgments lies in the cognitive demands of the task and is to be understood in the same terms as other problems in…

Proposes that young children employ two ordered, nonverbal classification strategies to interpret vague referential instructions: first, they rely on context; then, if the first strategy fails, they guess. If the guess goes uncorrected, they conclude that it was correct. Two studies provide evidence supporting children's use of the hypothesized…

Presents results of a German study distinguishing between effects of knowledge on writing and re-effects of writing on knowledge. Reports that knowledge primarily affects the content domain of text, especially topic relatedness and logical structure of text, but not the linguistic domain. Concludes that both oral and written verbalization enables…

The consistency, if any, with which force concepts are used by individual students in different, but closely related, contexts was investigated. A total of 534 university and high school students were tested to elicit their beliefs about the forces acting on various objects. Students' beliefs about the forces acting on objects at rest and in…

Presents results of a study of the role of context upon English children's estimation skills. Includes estimation tasks involving distance, area, and volume measurements and children's answers about how they carried out the tasks. Concludes that estimates in contexts perceived as mathematical differed from those involving perceptual-motor skills.…

Maintains that, for a cognitive construct to be accepted as explanatory, it must specify target behaviors, posit antecedent variables, and indicate how the antecedent variables can be measured independently of behavioral changes. Discusses epistemological tools that can be used in similar fashion. (CFR)

This article provides an empirical evaluation of an indexing technology, topic maps (ISO 13250), in the context of an academic task in a higher education context. Topic maps are a form of indexing that define and display the interrelationships between various topics in a given domain, as well as anchor these topics to specific resources that help…

The interaction effect between two process skills (application and interpretation) and two task contexts (scientific and everyday) was investigated. Korean students (n=255), ages 13 and 15, were the subjects of this study. Results reveal that there was an apparent interaction between process skills and contexts. Sex-skill interaction and…

Examines theoretical issues concerning the development of and the unity or diversity underlying private speech and studies the developmental progression of private speech in a low-income, culturally different sample. The effects of age, sex, environmental context, and the relationship of social speech to varieties of private speech are also…

Reports a study to examine secondary school students' (n=200) responses to two figurally and spatially similar problems from mathematics and science that require different responses before and after instruction. Results indicated that most students gave the same response to both questions. Reasons for this pattern are discussed. (MDH)

Uses test questions from the Basic Economics Test (BET) to reveal that elementary students are capable of understanding economics concepts. Maintains that neither ethnic background nor parental income makes a difference in economic learning. The most statistically significant determinant of improved scores was the extent to which a concept was…