Young children can generalize from known to novel, but the underlying mechanism is still debated. Some argue that from an early age generalization is category-based and undergoes little development, while others believe that early generalization is similarity-based, and the use of categories emerges over time. The current research brings new…

This study examined the degree that reliability coefficients for scores on the PTGI generalize across participant and study characteristics. Meta-analytic procedures resulted in observed and predicted mean alpha coefficients ranging from acceptable to excellent and appeared to be largely unrelated to the participant characteristics included in our…

Are young children just random explorers who learn serendipitously? Or are even young children guided by uncertainty-directed sampling, seeking to explore in a systematic fashion? We study how children between the ages of 4 and 9 search in an explore-exploit task with spatially correlated rewards, where exhaustive exploration is infeasible and not…

Objectives: The aims of this study were to examine the effects of group cognitive-behavior therapy (CBT) on improving anxiety symptoms and enhancing personal growth among adolescents at risk of developing anxiety disorders in school settings in Hong Kong. Method: A total of 26 participants received an eight-session CBT group and 20 received…

Three experiments with preschool- and young school-aged children (N = 75 and 53) explored the kinds of relations children detect in samples of instances (descriptive problem) and how they generalize those relations to new instances (inferential problem). Each experiment initially presented a perfect biconditional relation between two features…

Under what conditions will people generalize and remember observed social information? Preschool- (n = 44) and young school-age (n = 46) children and adults (n = 40) heard short vignettes describing characters' actions and motives on a single occasion. Characters were introduced using either proper names or category labels. Test questions asked…

In this study, 2.5-, 3-, and 4-year-olds (N=108) participated in a novel noun generalization task in which background context was manipulated. During the learning phase of each trial, children were presented with exemplars in one or multiple background contexts. At the test, children were asked to generalize to a novel exemplar in either the same…

In the context of competitive classroom settings and relativistic assessment schedules, some groups of students may particularly benefit from an emphasis on personal progress and personal growth approaches to their academic development. Building on recent promising results from general samples of high school students (undifferentiated by…

Subjects of 4, 5, 7, and 20 years of age performed a speeded classification task designed to isolate sources of interference in visual selective attention. While subjects of all ages were unable to avoid processing distractors, older subjects were better able to inhibit distractor processing. (RH)

Conducted a three-year longitudinal analysis of morphological spelling strategies in second through fourth graders. Found that, when children first adopt morphologically determined spelling patterns, they disregard the morphological basis. Generalization progresses from grammatically inappropriate words to the right grammatical category to the…

This research attempted to expand Piaget's study of children's thinking to include the content and the development of their concepts of death and the impact of experience on those concepts. One hundred twenty-two, middle-class, native-born boys and girls, aged three through twelve years were interviewed. Concepts were found to be composed of nine…

During a 1-day ropes course, 84 university residence assistants were exposed to 1 of 3 facilitation techniques (no debriefing, debriefing following experience, and using metaphors to frame upcoming experience). Results indicate that the experience was effective in producing individual and group change, metaphoric facilitation produced greater…

This study describes the steps taken to measure the integrity of an intermediate concept measure and test the assessment strategy of a well-validated dental ethics curriculum. Because this curriculum, which had been in place for 15 years, had consistently been shown to influence moral judgment, it was posited that a cross-sectional comparison…

This book contains six presentations from the American Society of Training and Development National Conference in St. Louis. The paper, Career Development, Personal Growth, and Experiential Learning, sees learning as the central task of career development, with experiential learning theory providing a framework for mapping career changes and a…