Twenty gifted learners (11 years old) demonstrated performance superior to 20 average age matched learners on problem solving tasks related to memory and attention, but not on all measures related to performance efficiency and strategy selection. Average Ss used significantly more advanced strategies when continued access to feedback was…

Conditions which call for the discovery of a problem were introduced to fifth graders in a divergent thinking exercise. Significant relationships were found between responses to personal drawings and creative attitudes and values, but not intelligence. Findings indicate that freedom to discover and solve problems appears to be the primary…

In a study designed to explore principals' problem-solving strategies, 11 highly effective elementary school principals were compared with 11 moderately effective principals from the same three districts. The principals' effectiveness was determined by central office administrators and by application of the "Principal Profile," a measure…

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)

Class inclusion problems differing in size of the array and in superordinate class were given to 84 boys and girls in grades 1 through 4 in a first experiment, and 41 boys and girls in grades 3 and 4 in a second experiment. The experiments sought to determine performance variables explaining the developmentally late appearance of class-inclusion…

Two experiments investigated relationships between state anxiety, memory processes, and children's performance on problem-solving tasks. Participants were second and sixth graders in a private elementary school in Redlands, California. In both experiments, subjects responded to three training and eight test problems presented in the introtact…

Young children and college-age adults were read short stories describing a consistent or inconsistent adult response to a child's action and were given additional information that resolved or failed to resolve the inconsistency. Results concerned subjects' abilities to detect and resolve the inconsistency and to repair a comprehension problem in…

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…

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)

A study examined the executive functioning of 55 elementary school children with and without problems in written expression. A model that reflects some of the executive function domains (initiate, sustain, set shifting and inhibition/stopping) which significantly separate good writers from poor writers was used, however, none of the executive…

Second- and sixth-grade boys were paired with a friend or an acquaintance (N=120), and each dyad completed a problem-solving task under cooperative, competitive, or no reward contingencies. Communicative exchange, affective expression, synchrony of task-oriented behavior, and task performance were examined for evidence of purported mutuality in…

Developmental differences in reasoning ability and item processing demands are analyzed in a study of cognitive determinants of number analogy performance in two IQ levels of elementary school children and college students. The amount of solution-related information in working memory was the crucial processing demand. Process differentiations of…

In order to (1) determine the cross-situational generalizability of self-monitoring behavior and (2) explore the correlation of self-monitoring behavior with other cognitive skills and achievements, 96 fifth-grade children were given three tasks assumed to measure the ability to self-monitor knowledge state during learning. During the first of two…

This study assessed the ability of third, fifth, and seventh graders to learn a problem-solving heuristic scheme and apply it to grade-appropriate tasks. A framework was utilized that focused on metacognitive aspects of task performance such as planfulness, strategy selection, monitoring, and evaluation. It was expected that use of the scheme…

Tests the hypothesis that high-SES children process information more efficiently using mechanisms associated with the left hemisphere and that low-SES children process more efficiently using the right. A laterality task was administered tachistoscopically to 120 children, divided evenly by SES (high and low), sex, and grade (fifth and seventh).…