The generality of academic self-efficacy judgments was examined among 588 high school students who rated their confidence for problem solving. A first-order model with a separate self-efficacy factor for each school subject displayed the best fit, so that verbal and quantitative self-efficacy were more meaningful than general academic…

Summarizes and challenges criticism that the behavioral sciences have failed to produce long-lasting generalizations due to cultural and historical relativism and interaction effects. Using findings from meta-analysis, the author argues that considerable consistency and validity across contexts of many generalizations exists, as well as promising…

A study reviewed 16 studies that investigated the effects of interventions designed to increase early social communicative skills of young children with autism by increasing their role as initiator of social interactions. Positive changes were reported for social and affective behaviors. Limited generalization or maintenance of target behaviors…

Notes young children's fast mapping ability for word and fact learning. Finds children's extension of a new word to novel objects from same category but lack of extension for new facts, as replicated by Waxman and Booth, unsurprising. Poses more interesting question: is word learning done solely through more general cognitive systems or through…

Studied the importance of occasion as a source of error variance in estimates of the dependability (generalizability) of science assessment scores and the Interchangeability of science test formats. Junior high school students (n=662) took hands-on and paper-and-pencil tests twice. Results show that recognizing occasion as a facet of error alters…

Two experiments documented that conceptual knowledge influences 3-year-olds' extension of novel words. When objects were described as having conceptual properties typical of artifacts, children extended novel labels on the basis of shape. When same objects were described as having conceptual properties typical of animate kinds, children extended…

Examined whether the atypical pattern of brain activity found in infants of depressed mothers generalized to situations not involving the mother. Found that 13- to 15-month-olds of depressed mothers exhibited reduced left--relative to right--frontal activity during baseline and during interactions with mother and familiar experimenter. This…

Choice typically is studied by exposing organisms to concurrent variable-interval schedules in which not only responses controlled by stimuli on the key are acquired but also switching responses and likely other operants as well. In the present research, discriminated key-pecking responses in pigeons were first acquired using a multiple schedule…

The initial purpose of the present study was to replicate procedures for teaching preschool children to recruit attention at appropriate times by having an experimenter signal the availability and unavailability of attention (i.e., arrange a multiple schedule involving reinforcement and extinction; Tiger & Hanley, 2004). Following the development…

Objective: Children with autism often demonstrate distress and oppositionality when exposed to requests to complete academic or household tasks. Errorless academic compliance training is a success-focused, noncoercive intervention for improving child cooperation with such activities. In the present study, the authors evaluated treatment and…

The purpose of this study, in an environment of Internet project-based learning, is to undertake research on the effects of thinking styles on learning transfer. In this study, we establish an environment that incorporates project-based learning and Internet. Within this environment, we divide our sample of elementary school students into four…

A reliability generalization of the Revised Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale (RCMAS) was conducted using the normative sample. The RCMAS consists of a Total Anxiety scale as well as four subscales. Results suggest that the Total Anxiety scores are typically reliable (median across 48 samples = .81). Subscale scores were less reliable: The median…

One important property of human object categories is that they define the sets of exemplars to which newly observed properties are generalized. We manipulated the causal knowledge associated with novel categories and assessed the resulting strength of property inductions. We found that the theoretical coherence afforded to a category by…

The instructional scheduling arrangements of simulated and community-based instruction across an equivalent set of functional and vocational skills were examined. Five secondary age students with moderate intellectual disabilities participated in four instructional scheduling arrangements measuring skill acquisition, generalization, and…

This study explores the meaning of the death of a companion animal through autoethnographic poetry in conjunction with narrative reflections. This method expands the depth and scope of poetry in qualitative research by transforming expressive works into both the subject and product of inquiry.