The present article reports on a study investigating the interaction of a reading comprehension test with gender in a formal testing context and the performance of males and females on reading test items with regard to demands on strategy use. Participants were 187 (59 = female and 128 = male) international students ranging from 17 to 20 years of…

Targeted homework is based upon the belief that homework can make a significant contribution to student achievement in the areas of knowledge, skills, and values. It centers on the notion that homework achieves maximum effectiveness when teachers share the school's homework policy as well as their policy with students and parents or guardians. The…

The ability to allocate attentional resources to relevant aspects of a stimulus event is a critical skill needed for efficient information processing. Evidence suggests that this ability to focus on relevant information without interference is dependent on the nature of the stimulus structure of the information to be processed. To test the…

The way cognitive, event-related brain potentials (ERPs) can aid in further understanding of memory span change in children is discussed. ERPs are time-dependent changes in electrical activity of the brain (as recorded by scalp electrodes) following the presentation of a physical stimulus through auditory, visual, or somatosensory modalities. The…

This report uses mental model theory to create a taxonomy of picture functions in order to relate these functions to learning theories. A rough outline of picture functions is presented, consisting of a retrieval function, a focus function, a construction function, and a supplantation function. It is suggested that this taxonomy could be helpful…

Focusing on educational settings, this paper examines receiver apprehension (anxiety associated with the decoding, interpreting, and/or adjusting psychologically to messages sent by others). The first section, in a review of the literature, discusses the theoretical basis for receiver apprehension. A summary of educational consequences is…

The four sections of this paper provide an analysis of the structure of human memory. The first section, intended to provide a clear example of personal memory, examines a hypothetical episode in the life of an undergraduate student, and shows how one episode can give rise to three different forms of memory: personal, semantic, and rote…

Discusses how one's conception of intelligence and its development profoundly affects the formulation of educational objectives. A mechanistic conception of intelligence leads to the definition of objectives as a collection of fragmented "cognitive skills", while a Piagetian conception attempts to develop children's intelligence as an…

The task consisted of categorizing a set of slides depicting concepts of freedom, nonfreedom, justice, and nonjustice. The results of the analysis indicated that abstract thinkers performed significantly better than did concrete thinkers and that performance increased as a function of grade level. (Author/BJG)

Research based on author's doctoral dissertation, submitted to the Graduate School of the University of California at Los Angeles.

It is necessary to provide a comprehensive program of visual literacy skill development to provide a firm foundation for reading comprehension. A taxonomy of visual literacy can suggest an outline for such a program. Once the student has been made aware of the desired thought processes in familiar contexts, it is then appropriate to guide the…

To provide effective instruction, a taxonomic framework is proposed which (1) includes all possible learner outcomes yet is understandable and manageable, (2) provides order to currently existing taxonomies of learner outcomes, and (3) facilitates instructional planning. Domains of organismic adaptation roughly corresponding to (1) the need for…

Very little cognitive development research has been done among African children, and most of the completed studies have relied on "translated" versions of Western test materials that are inappropriate to the African milieu. This paucity of research has had two affects: (1) rural African children have been represented as somewhat less…

The information processing terms "content" and "address" are used to describe structural differences between the constructs of individual identity and identity in the equivalence sense. In both cases a sameness relation is established in spite of specific differences. The resulting constructs of identity are known to be…

Coordination and integration of class information was examined using a multidimensional similarity judgment task in which four- and nine-year-old children rated the similarity of pairs of stimuli sharing either one or two attribute values. (Author/MP)