Young children can generalize from known to novel, but the underlying mechanism is still debated. Some argue that from an early age generalization is category-based and undergoes little development, while others believe that early generalization is similarity-based, and the use of categories emerges over time. The current research brings new…

This study examined the degree that reliability coefficients for scores on the PTGI generalize across participant and study characteristics. Meta-analytic procedures resulted in observed and predicted mean alpha coefficients ranging from acceptable to excellent and appeared to be largely unrelated to the participant characteristics included in our…

Are young children just random explorers who learn serendipitously? Or are even young children guided by uncertainty-directed sampling, seeking to explore in a systematic fashion? We study how children between the ages of 4 and 9 search in an explore-exploit task with spatially correlated rewards, where exhaustive exploration is infeasible and not…

Objectives: The aims of this study were to examine the effects of group cognitive-behavior therapy (CBT) on improving anxiety symptoms and enhancing personal growth among adolescents at risk of developing anxiety disorders in school settings in Hong Kong. Method: A total of 26 participants received an eight-session CBT group and 20 received…

Three experiments with preschool- and young school-aged children (N = 75 and 53) explored the kinds of relations children detect in samples of instances (descriptive problem) and how they generalize those relations to new instances (inferential problem). Each experiment initially presented a perfect biconditional relation between two features…

Under what conditions will people generalize and remember observed social information? Preschool- (n = 44) and young school-age (n = 46) children and adults (n = 40) heard short vignettes describing characters' actions and motives on a single occasion. Characters were introduced using either proper names or category labels. Test questions asked…

In this study, 2.5-, 3-, and 4-year-olds (N=108) participated in a novel noun generalization task in which background context was manipulated. During the learning phase of each trial, children were presented with exemplars in one or multiple background contexts. At the test, children were asked to generalize to a novel exemplar in either the same…

In the context of competitive classroom settings and relativistic assessment schedules, some groups of students may particularly benefit from an emphasis on personal progress and personal growth approaches to their academic development. Building on recent promising results from general samples of high school students (undifferentiated by…

Anxiety is one of the most basic human emotions and occurs in every person at some time, most often when someone is apprehensive about uncertain outcomes of an event or set of circumstances. Anxiety can serve an adaptive function, however, and is also a marker for typical development. In the school setting, anxiety is experienced often by students…

Discusses contributions of Adolph's study to behavioral knowledge; it is an important study of the early development of a universal basic pattern of human behavior, illuminating how humans perceive the possibilities for action and learn to use them when appropriate opportunities are offered. Notes that the study addresses generalization of newly…

A developmental model of mental activity is proposed, describing central processing skills that are metaphorical in nature. This metaphorical thinking, in which semantic fields and knowledge domains are juxtaposed to enable individuals to perceive similarities between prior knowledge and unfamiliar situations, enables individuals to develop toward…

This article presents guidelines for providing individuals with severe disabilities with a wide range of personal choices. It provides a rationale for teaching all individuals to participate in meaningful choice-making; describes basic types of choices; and suggests ways to generalize choice-making skills across settings, times, and people. (DB)

Third of three articles: the first appeared in Didaskalos, v2 n1 1966, and the second in Didaskalos v2 n3 1968. (RS)

Conducted a three-year longitudinal analysis of morphological spelling strategies in second through fourth graders. Found that, when children first adopt morphologically determined spelling patterns, they disregard the morphological basis. Generalization progresses from grammatically inappropriate words to the right grammatical category to the…

Learning is a metaphoric function in which the individual confirms or reorders his sense of reality by relating previous experiences with present ones. Outward Bound, an experiential learning approach, incorporates this insight in its theoretical foundations. The effectiveness of the metaphor is dependent on the extent to which the experience is…