Describes two experiments which were conducted to investigate the responses of eight-year-old children to differently worded spoken instructions for simple tasks, for which sentence length and complexity were systematically varied. Results indicate that children's accuracy improved with shorter and slower instructions. (Author/DB)

This study is from a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Ph.D. degree at the Institute for Child Study, University of Maryland.

Twenty-five retarded and 25 nonretarded children, mean age 16 and 9 years respectively, matched for mental age, performed two-bit (four-choice) and three-bit (eight-choice) problem solving tasks to determine whether group performance differences would increase with task complexity and whether performance of the retarded children would be poorer.…

The purpose of this experiment was to determine whether age differences noted when two tasks are performed concurrently can be accounted for in terms of age differences in single task baseline performance. Subjects were two groups of 12 eight-year-olds, and one group of 12 thirteen-year-olds. (CM)

This study investigated the effects of informative feedback on a matching task with three combinations of verbal feedback and three levels of task complexity. The three types of feedback were right wrong (RW), nothing wrong (NW), and right nothing (RN). The three levels of task complexity were defined in terms of number of irrelevant stimulus…

It is concluded that attentional capacity is independent of intelligence, and that critical changes in this capacity may occur between ages 8 and 9. (Authors)

Males and females in kindergarten and third grade predicted whether a boy or a girl would succeed on a masculine or a feminine task. Findings support attribution theory and indicate that differential perceptions of male and female performance exist in young children. (Author)

Provides additional data to explain the reverse effects of rewards on task performances for training problem-solving skills in fourth-graders. (RL)

It was observed that whereas in the average IQ level, the high-SES sample did better than the low-SES sample in short-term memory, this was reversed in the low IQ level. (Authors)

Compared were performances of 39 educable mentally retarded (EMR) Ss, mean chronological age (CA) 11 1/2 years, mean mental age (MA) 7 3/4 years; 25 fifth graders matched on CA; and 27 second graders matched on MA to determine whether children of different ages and IQ spontaneously demonstrate learning strategies after repeated practice with…

FIVE EXPERIMENTS WERE CONDUCTED IN AN ATTEMPT TO ISOLATE SPECIFIC LEARNING PATTERNS IN CHILDREN OF VARYING DEGREES OF MENTAL RETARDATION AND TO CONTRIBUTE TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE PHYLOGENETIC DEVELOPMENT OF INTELLIGENCE. FACTORS STUDIED WERE THOSE KNOWN TO INFLUENCE LEARNING IN NORMAL CHILDREN AND ADULTS--KIND OF REINFORCEMENT (VERBAL OR…

This study measured the feature selection and classification ability of 213 children between the ages of four and sixteen through an analysis of their sorting performance from a developmental point of view. (CM)