This study examines the effects of three levels of visual complexity upon the learning of an instructional slide tape program about the functions of a human heart. The three levels of complexity were a simple line drawing in color, an illustration in color, and a realistic color photograph. The effects of visual stimulus complexity upon…

Number right and elimination scores were analyzed on a 48-item college level mathematics test that was assembled from pretest data in three forms by varying the item orderings: easy-hard, uniform, or random. Half of the forms contained information explaining the item arrangement and suggesting strategies for taking the test. Several anxiety…

Using estimates of item ease and item discrimination, procedures are provided for computing estimates of the reliability and percentage of failing scores for tests assembled from these items. Two assumptions are made: that the average item coefficient will be approximately equal to the average of the estimated coefficients and that the score…

The relationship between play unit complexity and the behavior of 24 normal 3- to 6-year-olds was examined in three Viennese kindergartens. Play units were rated as simple (a unit with one obvious use and no sub-parts or juxtaposition of two essentially different play materials, e.g., puzzles or clay), or super (a complex unit which has three or…

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of age differences and differences in memory load on concept identification (CI) tasks of varying levels of complexity. Previous studies with young children found increasingly better performance on CI tasks with increasing age. This was in part due to the fact that older subjects categorize…

The Starkweather Target Game is designed to measure preschool children's willingness to try difficult tasks independent of ability. The game consists of a box-shaped target which responds, when the target is hit by a rolled ball, somewhat like a jack-in-a-box. When the bull's eye is hit, the lid opens and a surprise picture appears. After being…

Readability has been gauged by such means as determining the length of individual words in a passage, analyzing types of sentences, and assessing numbers of subordinate clauses, prepositional phrases, modifiers, and so on. Probably the most successful formula has been the Dale-Chall method, which measures readability by determining the percentage…

This study examines why the relational concepts of left and right are more difficult to learn than other relational concepts. A total of 72 children from kindergarten, third grade, and sixth grade, and an additional 24 college students were tested individually on a set of six realistic pictures. The task was to reconstruct the depicted scenes on a…

To determine to what extent children of preschool age comprehend the meaning of logical connectives, 64 5- and 6-year-olds were told to hand differently colored and shaped wooden blocks to an experimenter. The commands involved various English idioms used for conjunction (e.g. both black and round), disjunction (either black or round), and…

When subjects are given open-ended stimulus situations allowing for responses at all possible stages of a developmental theory, the stage scores of individuals for each situation can be treated as scores on polychotomous items. Extensions of the concepts of difficulty and discriminating power from the dichotomous case to this ordinal category…

Sixty subjects participated in an experiment involving estimation of difficulty of items in a test of reasoning ability. The estimates were to be given both according to conventional conditions of magnitude estimations with a preassigned comparison standard and according to a modified procedure of magnitude estimation where the comparison standard…

Four studies with infants and preschool-age children examined various pattern perception tasks considered to be related to the perceptual basis of the development of reading skills. Study 1 used 28 neonates to test the hypothesis that supplemental stimulation (rocking, patting, holding) has measurable effects upon attention to visual patterns.…

This paper traces the concept of complexity as it has been employed in empirical investigations of organizations over the last decade, presents a brief description of a doctoral dissertation in which complexity was one of the key variables, and then offers some summary comments on the utility of the complexity variable for school analysis. (Author)

Mean response times and slope of response times were correlated with intelligence and achievement for 94 sixth-graders. Mean response time reliability was greater than that of slope, and correlated significantly with IQ and achievement. Speed of processing information generalized across experimental tasks and reliably indicated intellectual…

A study assessed and compared the syntax in the oral language of six-, seven-, and eight-year-olds with the syntax in the written language of reading instruction textbooks prepared for children of the same age. (HOD)