This research review examines international studies on early childhood education and care, with particular reference to outcomes or benefits related to the child's age, the length of time in early childhood education and care, program type, and scope and type of parental involvement. Research literature from North America, Scandinavia, Britain,…

In order to investigate elementary school students' understanding of historical time, this study conducted open-ended interviews with 58 children in kindergarten through sixth grade. The students were asked to place nine illustrations from various periods of American history in chronological order and to talk about the reasoning behind the order…

A study examined the age-related differences in impersonal (objective) and personal (subjective) styles of thinking and the influences these differences have on traditional cognitive measures. Data were obtained from two 2-hour interviews with 333 participants in their homes, at senior centers, or on a university campus. All participants were…

This paper examines issues concerning access to health care for persons with disabilities, specifically the health status of the disabled, utilization and cost of services, and a comparison of health insurance coverage of persons with and without disabilities. Three age groups (children, working-age adults, and the elderly) are considered. Data…

The nature and strength of home and school environmental characteristics relating to attitudes of children in Ghana are investigated. A total of 200 second, third, fourth, and sixth graders randomly selected from 10 schools serving urban and rural areas participated in the study. Two instruments were used to collect data: the values and attitudes…

The purpose of this study was to investigate relationships between early family experiences of student teachers and observed teaching behaviors in preschool settings. A total of 109 students enrolled in teaching practicums at two locations completed a background information questionnaire. Subjects' teaching behaviors were noted by trained…

A study investigated the effects of preteaching vocabulary on students' performance of a writing task targeted to the use of those words. Subjects were 50 fourth grade and 55 sixth grade students. Materials included a pretest narrative writing assignment, a 10-word vocabulary pretest and posttest, a vocabulary instructional booklet with teacher's…

To examine the effect of structural factors on the development of story appreciation, a developmental model of story liking for suspense stories was tested by having second, fourth, and sixth grade children rate suspense stories on 10 affective scales. Specifically, the model predicted that (1) reader identification would increase with greater…

Two experiments investigated the effects of preceding sentence context on the naming times of sentence completion words in third-grade children and college students. In the first study subjects were shown incomplete sentences with four types of target words: best completions; semantically and syntactically appropriate, but less likely completions;…

A study was conducted to investigate issues related to the development of preschool children's self-definitions of attractiveness. Research questions were (1) At what ages can children state a self-definition of attractiveness? (2) Are self-definitions temporally stable? (3) To what degree are children's self-judgments similar to judgments made of…

Research on adult memory for nonverbal representations has found a significant age-related decrement in performance. To investigate age differences in adult locational versus featural information in visual memory, 90 adult women (29 young women with a mean age of 21; 30 middle aged women with a mean age of 43; and 31 older women with a mean age of…

Reactive scales dominate the self-concept field. Using these instruments leaves two questions unanswered. First, if left to his/her own devices would the individual even think of him/herself in terms of that dimension? Second, what are the dimensions in terms of which individuals do think of themselves? With these two questions in mind, 536…

To examine the relationship between children's social-cognitive status and the production of persuasive arguments and to determine the effects of age and the channel of communication on these arguments, 16 first grade, 17 third grade, and 16 fifth grade students were asked to produce both oral and written persuasive messages and were administered…

The research literature on aging was reviewed to determine findings with direct implications for educational programs for older persons and findings with no direct application but that raise further research questions. The focus was on cognition and learning in later life, predominantly on work published during the past two decades in major…

The National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience have provided a detailed and continuous record of the employment experience, education, attitudes, and family structure of respondents since the mid-1960's. The experience and attitudes of women who have participated in the NLS reflect social as well as demographic changes. A review of…