Compared data for 7,839 female high school students with regard to risk-taking behavior related to sexuality to similar data for 141 high-performance female high school athletes. Findings suggest that participation in a high performance sports activity is positively associated with some reduced sexual risk-taking behaviors for adolescent females.…

A study examined the extent to which linguistic variation in the English language might have been affecting the performance of 160 rural preschoolers in South Carolina. When dialectal variations were not considered, the performance of the children differed from that of the normative populations on tests that assessed grammatical morphemes.…

Investigated whether individual and developmental differences in look duration were correlated with latency to disengage fixation from a visual stimulus for 3- and 4-month olds. Found that look duration was correlated with disengagement latency. Three-month olds showed slower latencies than 4-month olds. Long-looking infants showed greater…

Asked 19 Finnish children, aged 6 and 7, on three occasions in a school year, to group their classmates according to ability. Results suggest that the impact of school and its differential concept of ability changes children's perceptions, lessening social reasons for appraisal and increasing the use of performance-based criteria. (SLD)

Introduces a cost-benefit transfer model which considers a performer's perception of need, sensibility, and effort to determine the likelihood of putting to use an idea learned in training. The model predicts use through a mathematical formula: the product of need and sensibility divided by effort. Case evidence of academic physicians are cited in…

This case study of Fairchild Semiconductor, a global company, illustrates how leadership training that stresses personal mastery (the ability to achieve a vision through recognizing and addressing individual and team obstacles) can lead to performance improvement. Topics include management skills; change agents; team and individual goals; and…

Provides instructional developers' (ID) insights and observations based on the experiences of a training and development organization, Sprint's University of Excellence (UE), as it evolved from a small group of 20-25 individuals in 1990 to a large business unit comprising almost 400 individuals in 1999. Discussion includes course development…

Changes in feature awareness and production during phonological intervention were examined in four preschool children with severe phonological impairments. Results indicated that the rate and degree of change in awareness did not always parallel production performance, suggesting that both feature awareness and production should be considered when…

Two experiments examined whether associating an imitation task with an operant task affected 6-month-olds' memory for either task. Results indicated that infants successfully imitated a puppet's action for up to 2 weeks only if the associated operant task (pressing a lever to activate a miniature train) was retrieved first. Follow-up study…

Preschoolers viewed stimulus sets comprised of a sample picture and three types of matches and were asked to choose a match that "went with" each sample. Children's choices indicated that a shift occurs between 3 and 4 years of age from a taxonomic bias to a thematic bias. Animate sample stimuli enhanced children's tendency to adopt…

Trained 3-, 5-, and 8-year-olds in temporal bisection task, with nonstandard comparison stimuli spaced linearly between short or long standard visual stimuli. Statistical analyses and results from different theoretical models of the data all suggested that temporal sensitivity was higher in the 8-year-olds than in younger groups, even when the…

Two experiments examined relation between age-related changes in retention and age-related changes in the misinformation effect. Found large age-related retention differences when participants were interviewed immediately and after 1 day, but after 6 weeks, differences were minimal. Exposure to misleading information increased commission errors.…

The authors examined the effect of prereading relevance instructions on reading time and learning for 2 types of text. Experiment 1 found that relevance instructions increased learning for relevant segments without increasing reading time when reading a scientific text sentence by sentence on a computer. In contrast, the same segments were learned…

The author reports on homeless people in London who have conducted the largest ever research study of the barriers to employment and employability faced by the homeless. A group of eight "peer researchers"--all with a background of homelessness, all current volunteers at Groundswell UK, an organisation which promotes self-help…

Investigations of reading have focused largely on two component processes, phonological processing and orthographic processing. However, a number of unresolved issues have hampered progress in the investigation of these abilities. Three such issues that formed the focus of the present study were (1) the extent to which tasks used to operationalize…