Available evidence does not support the notion that aging is associated with increasingly conservative social and political attitudes, or the idea that attitudinal rigidity is the norm among older cohorts. To examine whether aging is associated with attitudinal rigidity, nine surveys from the National Opinion Research Center were analyzed to…

Many studies of high school dropout rates have compared the number of graduates with the number of enrolled freshmen. An adequate representation of the dropout rate, however, must combine all categories of leaving school before graduation, and a longitudinal approach must be employed. A joint venture between the Chicago Panel on Public School…

This study investigated the effects of an older sibling's aid in an object sorting task on the younger sibling's conceptual style. Children aided by siblings used descriptive style less than children who worked alone; children aided by siblings four years older used inferential style more than children aided by siblings two years older. Children…

Cognitive perspective-taking has attracted considerable attention in the mainstream developmental literature, and is most commonly studied under the rubric of Theory of Mind. The current article reviews the levels of understanding of informational states that are believed to underlie cognitive perspective-taking from this conceptual framework. An…

Reports a study of 540 first-, fourth-, and eighth-grade students who participated in a discrimination task under three reinforcement conditions: reward, punishment and a combination of both. Results indicate the superiority of learning under punishment conditions. Interactions involving the sex of subject and experimenter are also discussed.…

Describes a study of the developmental ordering of syllable and phoneme segmentation abilities in preschool, kindergarten and first-grade children. Results indicate that both syllable and phoneme segmentation increased with grade level, but analysis into phonemes is significantly harder and perfected later than analysis into syllables. (Author/SDH)

A short-term memory task was used to explore the effects of verbal labeling and rehearsal on serial-position recall in mildly retarded 9-to 11-year-old children. Results support the view that verbal skills affect recall in mildly retarded children similarly to normal children. (Author/SDH)

Visual orientation toward a peripheral stimulus by newborns and 7-week-old infants was examined with both a central stimulus present and absent. General conclusion is that, contrary to previous assessments, the neonate appears to exercise internal control over his sampling of the stimulus array rather than being passively captured by it.…

Compares the self-concept of Negro and white children, using data collected in a study of 16 second grade, 40 fourth grade and 24 sixth grade pupils attending two parochial elementary schools in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; an attempt was made to control socio-economic status. (JM)

Children in various ordinal birth positions, grade levels, and sex roles perceive differently the degree or responsibility they assume for their successess and/or failures. (Author/KM)

Describes the development and testing of an objective measure of moral development, based on Kohlberg's moral stages. (DP)

This paper presents a study of metalinguistic awareness in young children. Metalinguistic awareness refers to the child's ability to concentrate on the sounds and patterns of language rather than on its communicative aspects. Metalinguistic awareness was studied by analyzing the verbal play and verbal games of 149 children from 6 months to 10…

To learn if differences in age, intelligence, and sex account for differences in children's recall of TV commercials and in the degree of insistence with which they request that the advertised product be purchased, 54 gifted, 71 normal, and 53 educable mentally retarded children of both sexes were questioned after viewing commercials for breakfast…

This study manipulated the relations between target and cue words in two cued-recall experiments with children based on the assumptions that: (1) the target cue relations that are most consistent with a child's semantic memory organization result in the highest levels of recall, and that (2) the optimal target-cue relationships may change with…