DSM-5, the fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association's "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders," was published in May 2013, amidst a storm of controversy. This article focuses on changes made to the diagnostic criteria for Specific Learning Disorders (SLD). Primary criticisms of the changes in the SLD concern…

The degree to which human intelligence can be improved by psychological and educational means will depend largely upon the level of analysis accepted as representing intelligence. Training and structured learning can enhance achievement in the form of knowledge and skills. Traditional Intelligence Tests (IQ) are fairly broad samples of…

To examine whether or not retarded individuals have the same structure of intelligence as normal IQ individuals, test scores from the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R), Reitan's Trail Making Test (TMT), and Beery's Developmental Test of Visual Motor Integration (VMI) for both a mildly retarded and normal IQ population of…

The effects of compensatory education programs in the United States during the past 20 years are discussed. The author believes the programs have had the least impact on scholastic achievement and intelligence quotient (IQ). The theoretical view of human intelligence and prevailing views of psychologists and educators of the 1960's regarding the…

Systematic observations of thousands of high school students in the California Mentally Gifted Minors/Gifted and Talented Education programs identified five principles underlying the development of high level thinking skills in this population: (1) Exceptional performance on any criterion requires mutually reinforcing antecedents, the effects of…

The purpose of this study was to replicate previous factor analytical studies of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R) employing children identified as gifted. However, rather than using the IQ criterion, a child's 11 WISC-R subtest scores were included in the analysis. Subsamples of gifted (as classified by local school…

This paper argues for the "nurture" side of the "nature versus nurture" debate of the nature of intelligence. It argues for the theory of multiple intelligences in relation to sociocultural and cognitive perspectives of second language learning. A brief historical overview of intelligence is presented, and classroom practices that lead to…

As part of a study to determine whether visual and manual response systems are correlated, 26 children between 40 and 51 months of age took part in visual and manual reaction time (RT) tasks. Subjects, whose RTs had previously been tested at 3 months of age, were tested in 1 of 2 conditions. In the first condition, subjects viewed pictures only…

A study investigated the effects of nonverbal and verbal classification abilities on reading comprehension. Subjects, 104 fourth grade students, were tested on three measures of classification skill (a shifting of criteria task, a free sorting task, and a three-level hierarchical classification task) and on a measure of recall of relevant story…

The British Ability Scales (BAS), published in 1979 (after a national standardization on a representative sample of British children), were revised and republished in January 1983. The BAS is an individually administered cognitive test battery for children aged between 3 and 17 years. It has considerable breadth of test content and provides a…

This study investigated the utility of central auditory processing disorder (CAPD) assessments in 70 children being evaluated for learning and attention problems, by assessing their relationship to auditory-based neuropsychological tests with varying degrees of attentional, linguistic, and cognitive complexity. Students were given several tests to…

This study explored the hypothesis that Japanese children perform significantly better on simultaneous processing than on sequential processing. The Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children (K-ABC) served as the criterion of the two types of mental processing. Regression equations to predict Sequential and Simultaneous processing from McCarthy…

It is often the case that intelligence tests do not measure what they purport to measure, although it is commonly assumed that every test with a different name is a test of different skills, and that tests with the same name test the same skills. Spearman attempted to study the relationship between tests that supposedly measured different mental…

A study explored the relation between Piagetian conservation tasks, IQ scores, and reading test scores. A series of 16 items involving conservation tasks for area, length, weight, and volume were presented to 516 students in grades four through nine. The scores on these conservation items were correlated with students' scores on achievement and IQ…

The effects of conservation activities on children's acquisition of Piaget's conservation concepts were investigated. One hundred and twenty-eight seven-to nine-year-old children in four classrooms were given pre- and post-evaluation measures of conservation ability. The experimental group completed a set of 42 self-directed conservation…