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…

The Children's Perception of Support Inventory (CPSI) which assesses the extent to which children perceive their families and peer networks as understanding, responsive, and supportive is described. This measure was constructed (1) to differentiate children on family and peer-support scales and to demonstrate the relationship between the…

A questionnaire was developed to obtain the expressed values of a sample of 469 fifth, eighth, and eleventh grade students toward eight societal components: self; home; neighborhood; school; religion; voluntary membership organizations; state; and country. Five positive statements for each component were followed by a scale that rated the level of…

The intent of this study was to examine the development of three aspects of preschoolers' private speech: coefficients of egocentricism, the extent to which speech regulates actions, and the syntactic and semantic structures of individual utterances. Forty-one randomly chosen preschoolers (26 females, 15 males) were placed in three age groups (3,…

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…

A study investigated whether older persons as a group are generally more persuaded by high authority figures than are younger persons. The study employed a design that allowed for extensive comparisons among subjects of different ages in terms of their willingness to be persuaded by physicians in interpersonal situations. One hundred-twenty…

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 different learning abilities of senior citizens and ways that older students can successfully maximize their learning effort in a class essentially designed for younger learners are discussed. Because of a regressed transformational drill behavior, the pedagogical hypothesis and the teaching strategy must de-emphasize a consistent audiolingual…

A project to evaluate Furth's Inventory of Piaget's Developmental Tasks is described, particularly as that test might be useful in adapting instruction and curricula to the cognitive level of science students. This multiple-choice paper-pencil inventory has 72 items in five problem areas: conservation, images, relations, classification, and laws.…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of protagonist's sex on moral reasoning ability. The moral reasoning of 335 white, middle class high school and college students was assessed by Rest's Defining Issues Test (DIT), in either its traditional format (all male protagonists) or an experimental version (all female protagonists).…

A theoretical distinction is made between the growth of word meaning and the development of word sense in Vygotsky's terms. A recall from semantic memory task and the semantic differential were used to operationalize these two conceptions of meaning in a study of 72 children aged 5 to 10 years. Results replicated typical findings for the growth of…

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 answer two main questions: (1) What are the vocational needs of high school students? and (2) What are the life history correlates of such vocational needs? Over 1,750 high school students in grades 8 through 11 were administered a measure of vocational needs, the Minnesota Importance Questionnaire, and a questionnaire…