Examines whether there is a significant difference between the achievement test scores of students who entered first grade as five year olds and those who entered as six year olds. Subjects were selected from Grades 1, 4, and 8. (MP)

Among 120 fourth and sixth graders, correlations between intelligence scores and agency beliefs for effort decreased with increasing levels of reasoning about effort and ability. Correlations between intelligence scores and agency beliefs for ability increased with increasing levels of reasoning. (RH)

Two studies were conducted with 8- and 10-year-old children to examine sources of age and skill differences in verbal analogical reasoning. Discussion focuses on the child's "problem space" for the analogy task and possible differences in task understanding that lead to strategy and process differences in older versus younger and skilled versus…

Examined the hypothesis that processes other than those related to concepts about ability produce helplessness in children younger than 10. Found that eight year olds did not experience helplessness in response to feedback about their failure in an achievement task but did experience helplessness when they failed to perform a physical task. (MM)

Cognitive theorists distinguish between two forms of memory. Explicit memory, requiring the conscious reinstatement of episodic memories, is manifested on traditional tests where the student is asked to retrieve information previously learned. Implicit memory is evoked when task completion is facilitated by prior experience with a similar task.…

A study was conducted to examine the task-related help-seeking behavior of 85 third- and fifth-grade boys and girls of varying scholastic ability. Participants, white middle-class children, were blocked into high- and low-ability groups on the basis of word comprehension subscores on the California Achievement Test. Children were presented with 16…

Describes a system by which teachers can show parents their child's academic performance in relation to other students in the class. Students are rank-ordered by date of birth and tests scores, allowing comparisons with other class members based on age and performance. (MDM)

Examined violent and nonviolent inner-city children's moral reasoning about violence in family and peer situations. All of the children condemned unprovoked violence. With provoked situations, the violent group focused more on the immorality of the provocation and perceived force akin to reciprocal justice, whereas the nonviolent group perceived…

Three experiments were conducted to explore the effect of word training on interference patterns in the picture-word task. Subjects were first and second graders. (MP)

Examined performance of first through sixth graders on conditional-inference task, using causal conditionals and a generation of alternatives task. Found a steady age-related increase in uncertainty responses to two uncertain logical forms and an increase in production of disabling conditions for "modus ponens." Individual differences in inference…

Mexican-American and Anglo-American children from a semirural low-income elementary school were tested for competition, individualism, field independence, and school achievement. The Mexican-American children were found to be more prosocial and less competitive, but these factors were not necessarily related to lower school achievement. (GDC)

Third- and fifth-grade children were presented with a picture-naming interference task to examine the effects of printing words in mixed typecase on children's automatic word processing. (Author/MP)

Pairs of elementary school children at different concept development levels were given problems to discuss, in order to examine the prediction, derived from the equilibration model, that when two children holding different beliefs must arrive at a consenus, the child possessing the higher level of cognitive development will prevail over the child…

Examines the stability of individual differences in test anxiety and learned helplessness of 82 children in third grade and later in fifth grade. Results indicate that teacher reports of helplessness had the strongest and most consistent relation to concurrent achievement and to achievement test scores two years later. (RJC)

The retention of the conditioned response was tested in a retroactive interference paradigm. Results suggested that what is learned by children in simple conditioning paradigms is different than what is learned by adults in the same paradigms. (Author/PN)