The study examined the relationship between performance of 19 severely handicapped students under training conditions and under each of two types of probe conditions: (1) multiple opportunity (the student is given an opportunity to perform every step in a task analysis); and (2) single opportunity (the student is not given the opportunity to…

The study sought to identify and measure factors in course achievement in actual college courses acorss subject areas and instructors, and to assess their influence on indicators of learning or achievement in these courses. Data sources included: interviews with instructors in two introductory economics courses and one introductory biology course;…

Two longitudinal studies of expert-level cognitive skills and their acquisition are reported. The first study focused on the skill of an otherwise normal subject who increased his digit-span to over 100 digits with 4.5 years of practice using the mnemonic system developed by W. G. Chase and K. A. Ericsson. The second study followed two college…

A study was conducted to test the hypothesis that high-variability rehearsal more effectively facilitates word recall than does low-variability rehearsal. Third-grade and sixth-grade students were asked to memorize a list of 20 common words. A read-aloud rehearsal procedure was used so that rehearsal could be experimentally controlled. One word…

A six-state survey conducted during the 1984-85 school year revealed that though school personnel feel that the actual impact of needs assessment studies on school improvement in general matches fairly well with the potential impact of such studies, these personnel also feel that the impact of needs assessment studies on specific categories of…

The present study assessed the effects that the density of an array has on two aspects of memory: the ability to recall a group of items and the ability to place these items in their original locations. First-graders, fourth-graders, and college students were asked to memorize 16 common objects presented in either a dense array or a spaced array.…

Existing theories of value debating (resolutions dealing with values rather than policy) may be more effectively applied and developed when viewed as stock issues paradigms for debating values in competitive situations. Issues are vital to an advocate's cause because they are essential to the meaning of a proposition and can also provide an…

In this test for age-related effects of perceptual interference under different task conditions, 240 subjects, 60 each in kindergarten and grades 1 through 3, learned the positions of 5 cards upon each of which 3 stimulus attributes--a word, a color, and a shape--were presented in different descending orders. Two stimulus conditions were employed,…

Tests of spatial ability that were designed to minimize the effects of sociocultural expectations on performance were administered to adults of both sexes. The tests examined spatial problem-solving, spatial memory, and psychomotor spatial performance, as measured by three "throwing tasks." Thirty-four male and 34 female university…

Performance on the Digit Span (DSP) and Digit Symbol (DSY) subtests of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) have been said to be vulnerable to the effects of anxiety, seating arrangements, and sex of subject. To determine the effects of these variables on anxiety and test performance on the WAIS-R DSP and DSY subtests, 40 male and 40…

Previous research has found that males perform better than females on the pursuit rotor. To examine whether males and females with different sex role orientations would perform differently on a motor task, 120 students (classified as androgynous, traditional sex role, cross-sexed, or undifferentiated, based on scores on the Personal Attributes…

To explore personal characteristics (achievement motivation and anxiety) which may affect performance on a recognition task, three studies were conducted using a 375-word text on dreaming. In the first study, 54 college students answered questions about the passage either with or without reading the material. Results confirmed that recognition was…

Self-efficacy, or a person's perception of his/her own mastery of a skill, affects subsequent task performance and predictions of future performance. To examine older adults' metamemorial knowledge with respect to predicting their performance on everyday and laboratory memory tasks, 28 adults (22 females, 6 males), aged 58 to 80 years, completed a…

Causal attribution theory, including the concept of learned helplessness, has been used to explain student motivation and achievement in school. In this paper, a model is developed which explains how attribution theory could explain student effort and achievement in mathematics. According to the model, student perceptions of success or failure in…

Previous research on the primacy effect in ability attribution has focused on intellectual ability, using intelligence test problems as the stimulus material. To examine ability attribution under conditions of ascending (improving), descending, and random patterns of performance on a typing task, 179 college students (69 males, 110 females)…