This study tested the factor structure of the explanatory style for failure (ESF) using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), tested measurement invariant across direct entry and transfer students, tested latent mean differences between these groups on the ESF factors, and tested a theoretical path model, whereby ESF explains variance in grades…

Background: A potential problem of low-stakes large-scale assessments such as the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) is low test-taking engagement. The present study pursued two goals in order to better understand conditioning factors of test-taking disengagement: First, a model-based approach was used to…

While today's schools in several countries, like Canada, are about to bring back programming to their curricula, a new conceptual angle, namely one of computational thinking, draws attention of researchers. In order to understand the articulation between computational thinking tasks in one side, student's targeted skills, and the types of problems…

Psychometric and utility studies on Social Emotional Assessment Measure (SEAM), an innovative tool for assessing and monitoring social-emotional and behavioral development in infants and toddlers with disabilities, were conducted. The Infant and Toddler SEAM intervals were the study focus, using mixed methods, including item response theory…

The performance of children ages three through eight years on a series of class-inclusion problems was examined in two studies. Three patterns of performance were observed: three- and four-year-olds responded in an approximately haphazard pattern, five- and six-year-olds tended to be consistently wrong, and seven- and eight-year-olds showed a…

This study tested the hypothesis that category naming is more difficult than instance naming because it requires suppression of readily available instance names. In experiment 1, junior kindergarten and grade one children named pictures of single objects under two conditions: "own" name (i.e., instance or basic level) or…

This study investigated how preadolescents and adolescents solve problems involving three temporal dimensions. Specifically examined was the question of whether speed and space information would influence the time judgments of 90 subjects 9, 12, and 15 years of age who solved 16 word problems describing the displacements of two cars. The problems…

Teaching styles were investigated in 28 middle-class sibling dyads (older sibling M age = 8.2 yrs; younger sibling M age = 5.11 yrs) using two sets of block design tasks (five easy; five hard). Older siblings employed a greater number of strategies (i.e. physical demonstrations, scaffolding, corrective feedback) in the hard than in the easy tasks,…

The recall effectiveness of semantic and phonemic cues was compared to uncover the pattern of deep and elaborate processing in relation to age and experimental treatment. It was concluded that aging results in poor elaboration, especially in inefficient integration of word events with the context of presentation. (Author/CP)

In this study, Vygotsky's theory of the interpersonal origin and cognitive-developmental function of children's private speech is outlined and compared with Piaget's view of egocentric speech, and some contemporary North American research on children's private speech is reviewed. For the study, 32 preschool-aged children were videotaped during two…

Children (ages 5, 7, and 9 years) and young adults completed two visual attention tasks that required them to make a forced choice identification response to a target shape presented in the center of a computer screen. In the first task (high correlation condition) each target was flanked with the same distracters on 80% of the trials (valid…

Age differences in recognition and recall of common nouns were studied using three groups of fifty students, with mean ages of 6.7, 11.4, and 16.9. Subjects were randomly placed in either an incidental or intentional learning condition. All subjects were questioned about the physical, phonemic, and semantic aspects of the same words, in the same…