Followup was conducted on 39 students identified as at risk for perceptual disorders based on diagnosis in grade 1 and on 79 children in a control group. Procedures included comparisons between risk group and reference group on test results from grades 1-9, analysis of interviews and observations of the risk Ss, and case studies of risk Ss.…

The study involving 33 children referred to school psychologists compared the Bender Gestalt and the Minnesota Perceptual Diagnostic Test-Revised (MPDT-R) in ability to predict intellectual and academic performance as measured by standardized tests. Factor analysis suggested that the MPDT-R provides unique information concerning…

Studies of the development of spatial representation have led to blind children being characterized as deficient, inefficient, or different when compared to sighted children. The study described involved 68 blind and blindfolded sighted students (7 to 18 years old) who explored a real or model room, either freely or guided along a predetermined…

Outlines research findings on enriched environment investigations on the development of the brain's neocortex. Although the research has been conducted on animal brains, researchers expect to find related patterns in plasticity in humans. The research is important to educators as it challenges them to define, create, and maintain an emotionally…

A preliminary investigation of patterns of teacher thought about student reasoning and learning involved presenting 23 preservice teachers with a "dilemma of practice about equity." Resulting stages of teacher development concerning equity in reasoning were found to correlate significantly with Perry's scheme. However for those who hold…

This study examined the influence of grade level, program content, and ethnic match between viewer and television characters on children's perceptions of the realism of families portrayed in television series. In the 1986-87 school year, a sample of 1,692 children in 2nd, 5th, and 10th grades completed a 13-item questionnaire measuring their…

A follow-up study was made of cross-sectional research on the development of dichhaptic lateralization. One hundred and eighty students in grades 3, 5, 7, 9, and 11 from two school districts were tested. Participants were 9 boys and 9 girls from each grade level for each district. Subjects were at least 90 percent right-handed, as determined by…

Recently, some researchers are considering the effects of classroom environment on student achievement and attitudes. Due to the concerted effort of a number of educators, remarkable progress has been made over the last quarter of a century in conceptualizing, assessing and researching this area of concern. However, today there is growing concern…

Investigates the relationship between hemisphere, brain preferences, and academic failure or success by studying 131 average and above average fourth and seventh grade students. Concludes that cerebral hemisphere functions do affect learning. (MM)

Examines the extent to which the changes in friendship during a school year influence children's impressions of their friendships and their preference for sharing over competition with friends. Also studied the differences between friendships in middle childhood and early adolescence, using multiple methods and measures. (HOD)

The cerebral laterality of children with various configurations of verbal-performance discrepancies was inferred with an objective measure of lateral preference using Verbal and Performance IQ scores of the WISC-R. Results were interpreted as lending support to the notion of competition antagonism between cortical hemispheres and a possible…

A developmental sequence of stages in the representation of regular space figures, first obtained in Jamaica, was cross-validated on a U.S. sample. Discussion centers on the relation between representational ability and perceptual development and on the variation in the difficulty of drawing different figures. (Author/MK)

To determine the developmental level at which letter processing skills become automatic, an experiment was conducted using a variant of the visual search task. Subjects in grades one, two, and three and in college searched for target letters displayed on a cathode ray tube along with either visually confusable letters, acoustically confusable…

An investigation of the disturbing nature of constructs underlying learning disabilities (LD) and the reliability of factors of LD characteristics within an ecological framework used 150 advanced undergraduate special education students as Ss. (Author/PHR)

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)