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…

A study was conducted to determine whether children in revising their writing to accommodate new information would make corresponding textual changes to preserve appropriate focus and cohesion. The subjects, 48 children each from grades three, six, and nine, were presented with a task that involved descriptions of pictures with incongruent…

There still remains in our social institutions and individual lives a considerable splitting between feminine and masculine gender distinctions. The present study determined the dimensionality of the space of 53 admirable personality traits hypothesized to relate to femininity-masculinity and creativity, and assessed preferences of females versus…

To date, the focus of research has been to demonstrate the link between interpersonal problem-solving skills and adjustment. Little attention has been given to the study of how specific interpersonal problem-solving abilities evolve or to age-related changes in overall ability. White students (N=30) identified as socially well-adjusted,…

Sex-role concepts in 120 children aged three to seven were assessed by means of an instrument that allowed children to categorize attributes as being characteristic of males only, females only, both males and females or nobody. The children sorted attributes once for adult peer stimulus figures and once for peer stimulus figures. The relationship…

Interpretation of experimental tasks is influenced by knowledge of the language used, by assessment of what the experimenter intends, and by how subjects themselves would normally represent the physical situation. Whether these processes in which children engage in cognitive studies differ from those employed by adults in similar tasks was…

THE PURPOSE OF THIS 1963-65 UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA STUDY WAS TO DETERMINE IF RELATIONSHIPS EXISTED BETWEEN THE DEGREE OF SUCCESS IN COLLEGE LEVEL COURSES AND SUCH CORRESPONDENCE STUDENT VARIABLES AS AGE, SEX, ACHIEVEMENT, COMPLETION, WITHDRAWAL, REASON FOR ENROLLING, DISTANCE FROM THE CORRESPONDENCE CENTER, PREVIOUS EDUCATION, AND THE TIME ELAPSED…

This paper reports the results of the second of a series of collaborative studies examining how children acquire the skills to represent and solve verbal addition and subtraction problems. The purpose of this study was to identify the cognitive processing capabilities of a group of Tasmanian (Australian) children. Fifteen cognitive tests were…