Adaptive behavior is defined as behavior where a system adapts itself to the requirements of the environment, and adapting behavior, where the system changes the environment to suit itself using a variety of tools. A wide variety of possible mixtures of both also becomes evident. The result of economic affluence is viewed as such "adapting…

Subjects are asked to answer six questions, partly with a frequency and partly by marking a verbally anchored scale with five categories. Some univariate and multivariate analyses are performed to elucidate the relations between variables with the two different modes of response. Although there are similarities in results for the two types of…

A taxonomy of response processes has been developed to facilitate the designing of training programs; each kind of task presumably would require a different set of training methods for greatest efficiency, so classifying a task would be part of determining which methods to use. A pool of response distinctions was collected, with special attention…

The authors' investigations of the antecedents and consequences of the empathy response have been guided by a three-component model of empathy. Two of these components are cognitive: the ability to discriminate and label affective states in others, and the ability to assume the perspective and role of another person. Emotional capacity and…

Numerous research studies have been conducted concerning the negative aspects of grading: the low correlations between academic success (high grades) and later vocational or professional success, possible sadomasochistic motives of teachers in awarding grades, and grade assignment resulting from the teacher's sense of duty or responsibility to…

The purpose of this practicum was to change the grading policy in the San Juan Unified School District (California) through a two-state process. The first stage was to change the traditional ABCDF grading system to a three-scale grading system in one high school, one intermediate school, and six elementary schools serving the same attendance area.…

Response latency data from two studies of 30 5-to 7-year-old and 50 3 to- 4-year-old children were analyzed to assess the interrelations of response latencies with previously reported orienting response data and standard learning data. Ss in the first study were tested on an oddity task in three distraction conditions (mirror, sound, and control),…

Dimensional preference tasks in both visual and haptic modalities with three dimensional stimuli varying in form, size, color, or texture were presented to 64 children. There were 16 subjects at each of four grade levels: preschool, kindergarten, grade 1, and grade 3. On each trial, the subject was presented three stimuli and asked to tell the…

The present study and a replication investigated the effects of personality variables on test scores obtained under Answer Every Item (AEI), Do Not Guess (DNG) and Coombs' Type (CT) directions. Subjects were administered a dominance scale and extreme scorers randomly assigned to one of the types of directions, then randomly assigned to complete an…

This study was designed to investigate the effects of increasing levels of task complexity on the conditioned emotional response (CER) with human subjects (Ss). Three hypotheses were proposed: (1) the CER would increase as task complexity increased, (2) there would be sex differences between Ss with respect to the interaction between the CER and…

Forty preschool Negro children took part in a study to test the effect of oral response versus listening in improving the spoken language of disadvantaged children. It was hypothesized that children who echo and produce sentences in response to an instruction to select the appropriate picture to match a spoken sentence would show greater verbal…

This research focuses on the effect of verbal behavior on the conditioning and extinction of an autonomic response, namely, the galvanic skin response (GSR). The major assumption is that the experimentor's verbal behavior produces verbal behavior internal to the subject, and this, in turn has a modifying effect on the conditioning phenomena. The…

An exploratory investigation was made of cross-modality matching within the context of word recognition skills among beginning adult readers. The specific aim of the study was to assess the possibility that a deficit in cross-modality matching might be potentially useful as a diagnostic and predictive indicator of the rate at which adults learn to…

The purpose of a study undertaken by the Center for the Cooperative Study of Instruction was to learn if a set of instructions could be prepared for students of composition which would indicate in behavioral terms what kind of writing was expected of them. These instructions, called "cognitive maps" consisted of a strategy and an exemplar which…

An audiovisual sensory test on 66 educational psychology students supported the contention expressed in Holmes'"Substrata Factor of Reading" that the individual differences in the sensory modes are not necessarily highly correlated. It further suggested that there exists an "intersensory facilitation," but that facilitation is probably not at the…