Physical characteristics such as height, weight, and muscular development have less influence on quality of swimming performance than actual practice and hard work. (JD)

Test results of 915 high school students taking a history examination with a choice of topics show that students were generally able to pick the topic on which they could get the highest score. Implications for fair scoring when topic choice is allowed are discussed. (SLD)

To examine the magnitude of situational constraint "bias," 30 juniors, seniors, and graduate students were asked to assess situational constraints and performance for up to 5 instructors. Results indicated that this bias is considerably stronger than previous reports had indicated and may be the dominant source of fairness in performance…

Younger and older American and Chinese adults were given arithmetic, perceptual speed, and spatial orientation tests. Younger adults showed substantial performance advantages over older adults. Performance of older American and Chinese adults was comparable on all ability measures. Overall pattern suggests that the advantage of Chinese adults over…

Clause, syllable, and response latency characteristics of conversational utterances were assessed in 14 boys who stuttered and 14 normally fluent boys. Findings suggest that changes in the number of clausal constituents that must be constructed, stored, or coordinated within an utterance may influence the likelihood of speech errors and, hence,…

Two classroom conditions (classroom demand and classroom attention) were systematically manipulated to explore their effects on performance under analogue assessments for a girl (age 7) with severe intellectual disabilities who exhibited aggressive behavior. Results demonstrated higher levels of aggression during demand analogue conditions when…

A study of 707 eighth-grade students investigated the influence of an instructional unit on the invention process and investigated the degree to which training influenced students' inventiveness. The students who received the instruction developed a significantly greater number of inventions, but the quality of the inventions was not significantly…

Scores on Raven's Progressive Matrices correlated positively with electroencephalogram-recorded alpha rhythm frequency (AF) in 101 healthy male adults, as did one test of verbal ability and one of mental performance. However, AF did not show significant relationships with general intelligence or spatial and arithmetic abilities. (SLD)

The nature of outstanding and weak performance in a teaching internship and how to predict that performance were studied with 100 interns. Personal qualities dominated the list of factors contributing to both success and failure. Expected indicators were not good predictors of success when judged independently of personal qualities. (SLD)

Two studies examined 9- to 15-month-olds' ability to deduce an abstract nonmatching rule from reward feedback. Results showed that physical connectedness between stimuli and reward was key to performance. In the absence of the perception that stimulus and reward were components of a single thing, even close spatial and temporal proximity were…

Links between theory of mind and episodic memory involving autonoetic consciousness were investigated in Japanese 4- to 6-year-olds. After age was controlled for, most theory of mind abilities showed no interrelations. Own and others' belief understandings on deceptive appearance tasks were solely related to source memory. Results suggest that…

A study involving three men with autism examined the effects of allowing the men to make their own activity schedules by writing down the order of their tasks. Social praise was provided contingent on the participant's task completion. Client engagement was substantially higher than baseline for all three participants. (Contains references.)…

This study compared 3- and 5-year-olds' reports of a true or false play interaction following repeated interviews. Findings indicated age-related improvements in performance. Three-year-olds questioned repeatedly about a false event made more errors in response to specific questions than their age-mates questioned about false details of a true…

Two studies examined whether preschoolers use whole-part juxtaposition to accurately interpret novel part terms. Results confirmed that children do use juxtaposition to guide learning of novel part terms and that such use was not due to memory effects nor to recognition of the grammatical frame accompanying juxtaposition. Children readily used…

The poor achievement of secondary students with learning disabilities in mathematics is often affected by prior low achievement, low expectations for success, and inadequate instruction. Good instruction involves careful selection of examples; explicit instructional design; a parsimonious use of time and resources; and techniques such as direct…