Investigated digit repetition performance in learning-disabled children in an effort to assess its clinical and theoretical significance. Clincally, learning-disabled children (N=100) had a higher than expected incidence of large verbal-performance discrepancies, although mean overall digit repetition performance did not differ appreciably from…

Results support the general conclusion that the disposition to respond in either a reflective or impulsive fashion influences the problem-solving efficiency and strategy behavior of elementary school children. The relative impact of cognitive style on problem solving varied with developmental level and the type of problem solved. (Author/BJG)

The research program described in this paper is an attempt to apply the integrated fundamental research efforts of the Center to a specific area of the elementary school curriculum, environmental education. The goals of the research program are to provide: (1) new knowledge about the interrelation of process, learning variables, and individual…

The conference described in this report was designed to explore fundamentally important aspects of educating 3- through 13-year-old children in a variety of school settings. A total of 250 participants, representing 17 states, attended. This volume provides the text of a conference paper by Melvin D. Levine, M.D., entitled "The Challenge of…

Reviews evidence that children use diverse cognitive strategies; discusses the adaptive value of using diverse strategies; describes models of strategy choice based on rational calculations; and presents an overview of the distributions of associations model of children's strategy choice. (RH)

Issues include consistent individual differences in children's strategy choices, interpretation of differences within a framework, and the relation of differences to standardized test performance. (RJC)

Focuses on students' immediate behavioral and cognitive responses and short-term outcomes during seatwork tasks. Twenty-four first graders in six classrooms were observed for the (1) apparent focus of attention, (2) nature of involvement with instructional stimuli, (3) initiative taken to seek help, (4) level of success, and (5) perceptions of…

Results indicated that children judged "imitative" and "contingent" tended to use primarily new information in resolving contradictory motive information in two stories (i.e., the stories' constructs), while children judged "noncontingent" tended to resolve anomalous information by interpreting the stories in terms of old information (i.e., their…

The results of this study support earlier contentions that standardized intellectual ability and school achievement tests are quite heterogeneous with respect to cognitive style requirements. The findings indicate, however, that additional variance was accounted for by cognitive style measures beyond that of verbal and nonverbal IQ relation to…

A large sample of 11-year-olds were observed on a perceptual maze task. Three ability level groups were formed and compared as to overall response paths and specific binary decision configurations. Explanations for observed qualitative differences and discussion of the viability of the experimental approach adopted are presented. (Author/RD)

Two experiments examined whether correlations between IQ and probed serial running memory depend on IQ-related individual differences in the retention of order information in short-term memory. Children's IQ correlated with memory, regardless of whether instructions emphasized serial or free recall; and with recent item but not recent order…

Three experiments involving 85 learning-disabled (LD) children and 101 non-LD children investigated whether memory difficulties of LD children may be attributable in part to executive processing. Results suggest that LD readers may suffer from executive processing deficiencies, although they do not rule out effects of language-specific processes.…

This report presents two research studies. The first, an experiment using 176 fifth graders, tested three hypotheses: (1) When content is held constant across messages, different formats of a medium differentially call for mental skills. (2) Formats which call for the same skills in different ways affect learners differently. (3) The TV formats…

This study investigates the relationship between temporal organization and the rate at which discrimination-reversal learning mastery occurs within sixth-grade students. Subjects were 22 male and 30 female students from a predominantly white, middle class rural school. Temporal behavior was assessed with a task that had subjects reproduce standard…

Considers whether the development of reading skills in different orthographies varies primarily as a function of common underlying cognitive processes, or as a function of orthographic transparency. Concludes that when the script is less complex young children appear to develop their word recognition skills with relative ease, even in the absence…