Since there is a lack of studies that reveal school age children's oral competence in story production, a five-year longitudinal descriptive study was undertaken to determine a child's sense of story as revealed by children's oral generation of stories. The specific story elements analyzed were sources of their stories, narrative form, formal…

Only a longitudinal study, in which retrospective reports can be verified against data collected earlier, can determine what topics tend to be reported accurately and whether certain types of individuals are more likely to be accurate reporters. A representative group of adults who became parents 50 years ago are now part of the oldest and longest…

Only a longitudinal study, in which retrospective reports can be verified against data collected earlier, can determine what topics tend to be reported accurately and whether certain types of individuals are more likely to be accurate reporters. A representative sample of women who became mothers 50 years ago are now part of the oldest and longest…

The differences in performance on a variety of cognitive measures were studied in 67 learning disabled (LD) and normal elementary school children. Younger and older Ss were administered tests of conceptual sorting, central and incidental learning, and selective attention. Teacher ratings of classroom hyperactive behavior were also examined. LD Ss…

Three studies tested the theory that long term memory consists of a semantically organized network of concept nodes interconnected by leveled associations or relations, and that when a stimulus is processed, the corresponding concept node is assumed to be temporarily activated and this activation spreads to nearby semantically related nodes. In…

Although numerous studies have indicated that older persons process visual information more slowly than younger persons, the precise nature of age-associated changes in the processing of visually presented information remains unclear. Older adults (N=18) and college students (N=18) performed a visual search task in which lists of words and…

The cognitive determinants of number series completion performance were studied by presenting a systematic set of problems to adults and to children of high and average intelligence, grades 4 and 5. Pearson correlations between these problems and the number series on the Cognitive Abilities Test were .51, .78 and .43 for the average intelligence,…

A study was conducted to determine whether children in revising their writing to accommodate new information would make corresponding textual changes to preserve appropriate focus and cohesion. The subjects, 48 children each from grades three, six, and nine, were presented with a task that involved descriptions of pictures with incongruent…

Interpretation of experimental tasks is influenced by knowledge of the language used, by assessment of what the experimenter intends, and by how subjects themselves would normally represent the physical situation. Whether these processes in which children engage in cognitive studies differ from those employed by adults in similar tasks was…

This paper reports the results of the second of a series of collaborative studies examining how children acquire the skills to represent and solve verbal addition and subtraction problems. The purpose of this study was to identify the cognitive processing capabilities of a group of Tasmanian (Australian) children. Fifteen cognitive tests were…

Although age-related memory differences in adulthood occur in a variety of memory tasks, most of these tasks represent uncommon memory demands. An investigation of everyday memory demands explored the effect of contextual organization on memory performance of middle aged (N=20) and older (N=20) women. Tasks involved reconstruction of spatial…

The determinants of student decisions to take or not take mathematics were studied. The variables selected for the study were derived from the expectancy/valve model of behavior. Choice is found to be influenced most directly by the utility valve of mathematics for attaining future goals and the interest of on-going mathematics activities.…

Perceived causality for events seems to be age-related, the cognitive structures of older children being more complex. The influence of age on interpersonal perception was examined by comparing the preferred causal attributions of youngsters in grades 5-13 for teacher behavior. A pilot study produced eight explanations of teacher behavior: (1)…

About 25 children in each of grades 3, 5, 7, 9, and 11 were tested in their ability to solve linear syllogisms, such as: John is taller than Mary. Mary is taller than Pete. Who is tallest--John, Mary, or Pete? Response latencies and error rates decreased across grade levels and sessions. Component latencies also generally decreased with increasing…

This study explored the developmental changes in children's effective utilization of verbal versus pictorial stimuli in forming connections between stimulus and response elements in a paired-associate task. A total of 112 children (56 males and 56 females), half of them 4-year-olds and half 8-year-olds, were tested under eight conditions involving…