Investigated were effects of maternal work status and parity on specific outcomes in maternal psychology and physiology and infant physiology. In addition, the study design and the usefulness of instruments were evaluated, and the feasibility of subject recruitment and retention was assessed. Subjects were 20 women between 18 and 35 years of age…

The family is the primary source of supportive services to the aged in this country. A study was undertaken to examine two issues related to developmental functions of relationships with adult children: the parent's view of assistance received from adult children, and age differences in those views; and, secondly, the functions of assistance…

These two studies, which were part of a cross-national project exploring the development of Italian and British children's understanding of sociolinguistic rules, investigated politeness in children's requests addressed to adults and children, and children's views on how requests addressed to persons differing in status and familiarity would be…

The purpose of this study was to assess children's and adults' quantitative understanding of fractions in a new and potentially definitive way, and to determine whether this understanding was related to fraction computational skill. Thirty-seven seventh graders and 32 adults (college students) participated in the study. A computation task was used…

This study examined how grade level and gender affected student teachers' self-ratings and faculty and field supervisors' ratings of student teachers' performance. The sample consisted of 47 preservice students in a medium-size Texas university. The Texas Performance Evaluation Instrument was administered in the second semester, at the end of a…

The relationships among time perspective, mood, age, and an academic grade point average (GPA) and goal-writing abilities were investigated in 123 senior baccalaureate nursing students from three university programs. Time perspective--past, present, and future--was measured by an Experiential Inventory, Circles/Line Test, and two Opinion Surveys.…

This study, which involved a Malaysian sample, investigated students' and teachers' conceptions of intelligence, and related age and geographic differences. In phase 1, a group of 25 teachers and 196 of their 12-, 14-, and 16-year-old students were asked to describe the characteristics and behaviors of an intelligent student. Responses were used…

The specific aim of the present study is to examine children's metalinguistic awareness of one aspect of pragmatics: the request function. This function was selected for study because it is one of the earliest language functions to appear and because it has been the object of both theoretical and empirical research. Fourteen normal…

Three studies were conducted to investigate the development of the ability of individuals of varying ages to use macrorules for paraphrasing expository text. Macrorules were defined as the general rules of deletion, superordination, selection, and invention that underlie comprehension of prose. In the first study, 18 fifth grade, 16 seventh grade,…

The assumptions individuals make about their personal behaviors have received extensive attention, particularly the concepts of locus of control and self-efficacy. An additional concept, change orientation, refers to assumptions about how to change personal behavior. Approximately 180 subjects ranging from college freshmen to graduate students…

Through the use of a model combining constructs proposed by Zigler and Trickett (1978) and Schaefer (1978), the structure of social competence in preschool children was investigated. Measures chosen for inclusion in the assessment battery and specific variables related to each measure were the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, Revised…

The purpose of this study was to explore the conceptions, feelings and attitudes of elementary and junior high school students toward the topics of aging, the elderly, death, and dying. To gather data, an announcement was made to all schools within the state that the Rhode Island Gerontology Center would sponsor a contest for all school children…

A program of research was conducted to study transitions from preoperational to concrete operational forms of spatial imagery (area 1), to compare results from spatial imagery studies based on open-ended measures (such as drawings) with results based on reaction time measures (area 2), and to study anticipatory imagery in the contexts of memory…

Information about the types of characteristics seen by parents and adolescents in similar fashion and those seen differently may result in better prediction of teenage behavior. To compare the perceptions of adolescents and adults on 20 personality characteristics, rating tables originally constructed by Hess and Goldblatt (1957) were given to 35…

Analysis of students' interpretations of a complex episode of social interaction was used to illustrate three features of human plans that distinguish them from robot plans and that form a basis for a theory of the development of social action. The features illustrated are that (1) human plans are social, (2) human plans operate on…