Evidence which suggests that pretend activities become increasingly independent of the presence of realistic objects is examined in this paper. Results of research on pretend behavior in children 1 1/2 - 2 years of age are described and analyzed. Striking changes in pretend behavior are shown to occur during the second year of life. Pretend play…

This study is a compilation of some of the published material on the social readjustment of widows and widowers plus a sampling (26) of personal interviews which the researcher conducted. The loss of a spouse is a traumatic experience. The emotional turmoil that follows, caused by the personal mode of living, circumstances of the death, treatment…

Two experiments related to the development of verbal self-control in children were conducted. In the first experiment, 36 adults and 36 four year olds were administered a vocal alone, a motor alone, and a combined-reaction-time task. In the second experiment, 54 kindergarten subjects and 60 fifth-grade subjects were each administered a double…

In this study, naturalistic patterns of parent-child interaction were unobtrusively observed in supermarkets to describe characteristics of breakfast cereal selection by 516 family units. The interaction sequence was summarized into five dimensions: initiating party, tone of initial message, type of response, type of consequence, and references to…

This paper considers (1) the requirements imposed on data in order to conform to the Rasch model, (2) some common sources of departure from the model, and (3) a procedure for recognizing the occurrence of these disturbances. The specific disturbances discussed are guessing, practice, speededness, and bias. The observed characteristic curve for…

Because many of the Veterans Administration hospitals in Appalachia are located great distances from medical teaching facilities, high powered communication satellites have been employed to facilitate quality two-way communication between medical personnel scattered throughout the region. To achieve diagnostic, therapeutic, and educational…

This study investigated the impact of the major and minor modes of a melody on perceptions of shots in a short videotape. One hundred forty-six undergraduate communications students from Queens College in New York were exposed to the experimental situation. Three variables were manipulated: the first shot portrayed a male actor who had either a…

Children's performance on multidimensional classification tasks was examined in two experiments. In Experiment 1, preschool, first-, and third-grade children were shown a standard stimulus and were then asked to judge whether several comparison stimuli were the same as or different from the standard. Comparison stimuli differed from the standard…

This paper reports some of the preliminary findings of an investigation of the ways in which married couples experience pregnancy. Demographic, historical, personal, and marital information was gathered through individual interviews with each prospective parent. The 57 variables measured were combined to make six clusters: (1) experience of…

The purpose of the document is to assess facilitating and interfering effects of various strategies in samples of children from elementary and high school grade levels. Participating in the paired-associate study were 160 children, 40 each from first, third, sixth, and eleventh grades. Subjects were required to learn a 36-item aurally presented…

Videotapes were used to determine disruptive versus relevant student behavior exhibited (1) with teachers trained under the Oral Language Program (OLP) implemented by the Southwest Cooperative Educational Laboratory and (2) with non-OLP teachers. Five categories of disruptive behaviors--gross motor, noise making, verbalization, orienting, and…

The bibliography on learning in mentally handicapped persons is divided into the following topic categories: applied behavior change, classical conditioning, discrimination, generalization, motor learning, reinforcement, verbal learning, and miscellaneous. An author index is included. (KW)

Six research studies involving computer assisted instruction (CAI) are reported. "Gradient and Full-Response Feedback in Computer-Assisted Instructions" did not substantiate the hypothesized advantages of gradient-response over full response feedback on the basis of amount learned (n=24). "Relative Effectiveness of Various Modes of Stimulus…

PLANIT (Programming Language for Interactive Teaching) is a general purpose teaching system that allows a lesson designer to enter course content into the computer for use as a teaching device. The user (lesson designer or student) communicates with the system via a keyboard. Interacting with PLANIT, he can build and edit lessons, present lessons,…

This paper presents research into the characteristics of low-income families in the Portland, Oregon area. The contention is made that the learning behavior of children from these families is affected by their pre-school and early school experiences, which may be unsatisfactory in preparing them to learn. Three types of aberrations may affect…