The effects of introducing a microcomputer into an elementary-school classroom were studied using a naturalistic paradigm. Initial questions investigated the impact of the microcomputer on children's behavior, interactions, and responses to available software; and on the teacher's role. Data were fathered through: weekly observation for 4 months;…

In comparing research conducted in the Netherlands and the United States on parental reports of child behavior, this document reports several studies in which Dutch parents of children ages 3 to 36 months completed a translated version of Bates' Infant Characteristics Questionnaire (ICQ). In the first part of the Dutch study, 7,000 parents…

In two phases, this study examined age-related changes in children's knowledge about two familiar domains and how these domains are organized in permanent memory. Forty 5-year-olds and 40 7-year-olds from a small academic community generated exemplars from the animal and cartoon character domains and provided information about sets of animals and…

Two experiments with 167 first-, third-, and fifth-grade children revealed age-related changes in the composition of natural categories. Categorization was investigated via perceptual similarities of objects and conceptual similarities of superordinate classes. The free-classification paradigm (Garner, 1974) was adapted to natural categories,…

Two studies are presented which investigate the influence of various toy structures on the frequency of individual fantasy play forms in 3- to 6-year-old children. In the first study, the effects of high-realistic/high-complexity and low-realistic/low-complexity toy structures were compared. There were significant main effects for the factor toy…

Currently, professionals disagree about whether children should be informed about their illnesses and the possibility of their deaths. Some experts feel discussion of these subjects would only upset the children while others feel this knowledge is the children's right and will allay the children's anxieties. What is needed but not available is…

The convergence of several lines of psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic research suggests possible explanations for age-related influences on language acquisition. These factors, which include cognitive development, sociocultural context, affective factors, and language input, can be helpful to language educators. By being alert to the cognitive…

The timing and order of life events must be studied from both cross-cultural and cross-temporal approaches since timing and order of life events in the aging process vary with sociohistorical change in different societies. This study examined the timing of marriage from the life-course perspective. Subjects were 52 rural Japanese mothers between…

One of the purposes of this study was to develop a coding scheme based on Wertsch's theoretical extension of Vygotsky's ideas for describing parent-child interaction during exploration. This scheme was then applied to identify the most common patterns of parent and child situation definitions, negotiations of shared definitions, and questions…

In order to determine the extent to which New York City students are dropping out of high school, the progress of the over 70,000 members of the class of 1986 was followed from September 1982, through June 1986. By the date of their anticipated graduation, the class of 1986 was characterized by the following: (1) 22 percent had dropped out; (2) 12…

A study compared the amount of contact and the attitudes of young and old individuals toward computers and computer-based instruction (CAI). Developmental differences were examined in the effectiveness of two instructional design features--the use of pictorial (graphics) versus highlighting--and extent of learner participation. Fifty elderly…

The purpose of this project was to develop a motor performance test for preschool children that would be economical to administer, valid, and reliable. Four test items--standing long jump, hopping within an 18-inch square, balancing on one foot, and a timed gross agility task, were selected from published tests to assess children's strength,…

A three-stage developmental model of the socialization of altruism as a reinforcer was tested. The model posits mood as a mediator of helping behavior. The first stage of the model is characterized by a relatively low level of altruistic responding, regardless of mood state, among preschool children; the second by the acquisition, among…

The beneficial role that leisure can play in the lives of older persons is increasingly recognized by gerontologists and leisure service specialists. To study the psychological benefits of 18 commonly chosen leisure activities, 1,649 older adults, aged 55-75, responded to 27 paragraphs measuring the psychological benefits of leisure activities,…

This study tested the hypothesis that category naming is more difficult than instance naming because it requires suppression of readily available instance names. In experiment 1, junior kindergarten and grade one children named pictures of single objects under two conditions: "own" name (i.e., instance or basic level) or…