A study examined the contributions which families made to the success of 15 young adults with mental retardation in competitive employment. The following family characteristics led to more successful employment outcomes: moral support, practical assistance, role models of appropriate work ethic, protection from difficulties and exploitation, and…

Evaluated the effect of using the mastery learning techniques of self-directed feedback, reinforcement, and remediation of knowledge on the performance of a work-related task involving transfer of training. Supports the hypothesis that mastery learning would have a positive effect on transfer of knowledge from the classroom to a work-related task.…

The relationship between verbal and visual-spatial working memory and mathematical computation skill was examined in 98 children and adults with and without mathematical disabilities. A hierarchical regression analysis, when partialing for reading ability, age, and gender influences, showed mathematical computation was better predicted by verbal…

Tested in three experiments hypothesis that coordinating saying number-words and pointing to each object to count requires use of the central executive and that cost of coordination decreases with age. Found that for 5- and 9-year-olds and adults, manipulating difficulty of each component affected counting performance but did not make coordination…

Three experiments tested the ability of 11 children (ages 6-10) with low vision to recall black-and-white line drawings. Unlike fully sighted age-matched controls, children with low vision recalled best when left to study pictures without verbal intervention. They also named significantly fewer of the remembered pictures correctly. (Author/PB)

Discusses how to develop performance standards based on objective, observable criteria and describes how the reference department at the University of Nebraska at Omaha developed standards to meet their needs. Goals for performance are explained, and preliminary and final versions of the reference desk performance standards are appended. (Contains…

Studied the relationships among motivation, persistence, and performance in a sample of 51 German college students. Path analysis showed that initial motivation influenced persistence but that the relationship between persistence and performance was disrupted because learners with more knowledge stopped sooner. (SLD)

Examined how 3- and 5-year-olds and adults extend names for human-made artifacts. Found that even 3-year-olds were more likely to provide artifact names (e.g., "knife") when they believed objects were intentionally created and to provide material-based descriptions (e.g., "plastic") when they believed objects were accidentally…

Examined whether 6-month-olds expect people to behave differently toward persons and inanimate objects. Found that infants habituated to an actor talking to something hidden behind an occluder looked longer at an object, whereas infants habituated to an actor reaching and swiping looked longer at a person. No difference in looking at stimuli was…

The effectiveness of video-based staff training with manager-led exercises in improving the performance of six staffers in residential support for persons with disabilities was examined. The training procedures improved performance in hand-washing, glove usage, and frequency of positive interaction, but not in the frequency of valued activities.…

This study investigated the relationship of 3-year olds' reliance on desire when predicting behavior and their performance on false-belief tasks. Results suggested that young children may use the desires of the agent, rather than their own desires, to predict behavior in standard false-belief paradigms. Older preschoolers also have difficulty…

A 40-year longitudinal study of creativity that began in 1958 in two schools in Minneapolis, Minnesota, found that girls identified as highly creative in elementary school have been fulfilling that potential as adults to a significantly higher degree those who were less creative. Sex role expectations are discussed. (Contains references.) (CR)

Examined effects of interfering information and instructions to forget on preschoolers' and kindergartners' story retention. Found that retroactive interference affected preschoolers' storage- and retrieval-based forgetting rates and kindergartners' storage-based forgetting rates. Intentional forgetting reduced retroactive interference primarily…

Two studies investigated whether language-specific patterns encoding manner and direction of motion in English and Greek affect adult and child speakers' performance on nonlinguistic motion tasks and linguistic descriptions of these motion events. Although the two linguistic groups differed in linguistic preferences, nonlinguistic task performance…

The effect of the reduction of the temporal envelope produced by multichannel compression on recognition was examined in 16 listeners with hearing loss, with particular focus on audibility of the speech signal. Multichannel compression improved speech recognition when superior audibility was provided by a two-channel compression system over linear…