This literature review on antecedents, behaviors, and consequences in the noncompliant behavior of people with mental retardation found that noncompliance is more likely when instructions are vague or task demands are too difficult and that noncompliance responds well to programs utilizing combinations of social and tangible rewards. (Author/JDD)

Stuttered sentences pronounced by 12 4- to 6-year-old children in spontaneous conversation were analyzed for length and grammatical complexity. Results indicated that sentences in which stuttering occurred within the first three words were significantly longer and more complex than sentences where no fluency failure was found. Implications for…

Surveys individuals teaching full time while at the "All but Dissertation" (ABD) stage to discover barriers and paths to successful completion of the dissertation while employed. Provides suggestions on how to successfully complete the dissertation while teaching full time. (SR)

Twenty-four hearing-impaired subjects (mean age 67 years) were tested for lipreading skills under 3 conditions (full face, eyes masked, only lips visible). Results show no significant association between facial visibility and lipreading ability. Results are interpreted in the context of the phonological and semantic components of speech.…

Assisted and unassisted performance of 14 average readers and 14 readers with learning disabilities (ages 10-13) were compared on a reading comprehension task. The groups differed in how easily they learned to find the main idea under different topic sentence placement conditions, with the learning-disabled readers requiring significantly more…

Investigation of grammaticality judgments and decision times for 21 children in 2 age groups (ages 6-7 and ages 8-9) found good sensitivity to grammatical errors, with errors in word order more readily detected than errors of morphological selection. Older children processed errors somewhat more quickly. (Author/DB)

Discussion of document retrieval systems and measuring system performance focuses on the upper bounds, or maximum performance, that can be obtained with a system. Topics addressed include bounds for retrieval performance; average search length; average precision; incomplete searches; an asymmetric measure of retrieval performance; and measuring…

Relationships between multiple-choice test answer changing and testwiseness skills, and between these two variables and examination performance were studied with 150 college business students. Answer-changing behavior was related to multiple-choice test performance but not to testwiseness or performance on the nonmultiple choice portion.…

A study involving 553 college students, 27% of whom reported a history of child abuse, investigated whether family of origin dysfunction was associated with poorer childhood memory. Weak associations were found between family of origin dysfunction and poorer general quality of childhood memory. (Author/CR)

A model of the intrapersonal processes impacting computer-related performance was tested using data from 75 manufacturing employees in a computer training course. Gender, computer experience, and attributional style were predictive of computer attitudes, which were in turn related to computer efficacy, task-specific performance expectations, and…

Examines attitudes of 1,150 teachers from Charlotte-Mecklinberg (North Carolina) and 1,748 Kentucky teachers working under school-based performance award programs with monetary bonuses if their schools met or exceeded student achievement goals. Findings suggest that the motivational potential of the incentives can be offset by undesirable program…

Four studies were conducted to assess gender differences in the effects of extrinsic motivation on creativity. Results indicate expectations of evaluation and work for reward lowered the creativity of middle school girls, but not that of boys. Expecting ungraded feedback reduced the negative impact of expecting evaluation and the gender…

A study of 402 gifted Australian students grouped in selective high schools, 76 gifted students grouped in accelerated cohorts, and a mixed ability group of 62 students found intrinsic motivation was positively correlated with quality of school life variables and negatively associated with aspects of tedium. (CR)

Compared the mismatch-negativity (MMN) component of auditory event-related brain potentials to explore the relationship between phonological short-term memory and auditory-sensory processing in 7- to 9-year olds scoring the highest and lowest on a pseudoword repetition test. Found that high and low repeaters differed in MMN amplitude to speech…

Examined abilities of 3- to 16-year olds and adults to resist interference during the processing of two auditory dimensions of speech--the speaker's gender and spatial location. Found that the degree of interference from irrelevant variability in either dimension did not vary with age. In the presence of conflicting task-irrelevant information,…