Discusses areas where teachers may harbor mistaken assumptions about their students' understanding when using graphing calculators: (1) confidence and competence with order of operations, (2) integration of algebraic and graphical knowledge, and (3) scaling a graph. (MKR)

Illiterate immigrant adults (n=14) in France were assessed on ability to master three metalinguistic tasks: judgment of phonological length of words, initial consonant deletion, and lexical segmentation of sentences. Performance of illiterates and partial illiterates dramatically improved after training which involved corrective feedback and…

Some factors that should be considered when science teachers produce materials for their students are presented. Readability and the key aspects of language (vocabulary, sentence structure, textbook or examination style, and organization and presentation) are discussed. Directions and the graph needed for estimating the reading level of materials…

Discusses the selection of material for vocal performances by high school students. Describes adolescent voices as young with little vocal technique and only partially developed or unused register. Includes considerations of breath management, tessitura, energy, subject matter, and language. Provides a list of songs meeting appropriate…

The recommendation that the reliability of multiple-choice tests will be enhanced if the distribution of item difficulties is concentrated at approximately 0.50 is reinforced and extended in this article by viewing the 0/1 item scoring as a dichotomization of an underlying normally distributed ability score. (SLD)

Forty deaf high school students defined words from the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test and then ranked missed words in terms of expected difficulty level. After judging the accuracy of the rank-order judgments, it was determined that deaf students were unable to judge their feeling of knowing, but two hearing groups were able. (Author/JDD)

A pilot experiment examined ambiguity in English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) learning by graduate and undergraduate students. The findings revealed that most ESL speakers have greatest difficulty in understanding sentences with derived-structure ambiguity. Underlying-structure ambiguity was the next most difficult to understand, followed by lexical…

This study, involving 59 disabled and nondisabled adolescent readers, tested A. Kennedy's "spatial map" hypothesis wherein spatial sequencing ability is important in lexical reaccess under high-demand text situations alone. Tests of the variance contributions of a spatial sequencing covariate to eye movement dependent measures of reading, across…

This paper reviews research on disturbances of children with developmental delays and handicaps in responding to complex stimuli, suggesting that such disturbances may deleteriously influence behavioral/neurophysiological development. Intervention programs for teaching children with autism a generalized set to use in responding to complex…

Discusses hierarchical complexity of tasks as a way of conceptualizing information in terms of the power required to complete a task, and its implications for developmental psychology and information science. Provides an analytic solution to the definition of developmental stages and allows for the possibility within the science of scaling the…

Studied the effects of subject and track level on the definitions of knowledge used by teachers in secondary education. Judgments of the characteristics of their own subjects as they taught them at one or more track levels were provided by 202 teachers. Teachers generally maintained a single definition for the subject for all track levels.…

Effects of self-adapted testing (SAT), in which examinees choose the difficulty of items themselves, on ability estimates, precision, and efficiency, mechanisms of SAT effects, and examinee reactions to SAT are reviewed. SAT, which is less efficient than computer-adapted testing, is more efficient than fixed-item testing. (SLD)

This research unites traditionally disparate developmental domains--cognition and locomotion--to examine the classic cognitive issue of the development of inhibition in infancy. In 2 locomotor A-not-B tasks, 13-month-old walking infants inhibited a prepotent response under low task demands (walking on flat ground), but perseverated under increased…

An analysis of the 1990 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) found that only 46 percent of all high school seniors demonstrated success with a grasp of decimals, percentages, fractions and simple algebra. This article investigates error patterns that emerge as students attempt to answer questions involving the ability to apply…

The present study examined performance on an arithmetic task of increasing difficulty and a frustrating puzzle task for children with ADHD and comparison children. Emotional competence also was investigated in the two groups. Sixty-four children, 21 previously diagnosed with ADHD, participated. Performance on the arithmetic task was measured in…