The behavior of four adolescents with severe or profound mental retardation was evaluated in the presence of four sets of materials during periods of unstructured leisure activity. Results indicate that the participants allocated their time principally to stereotypic behavior with materials when the number of sets of materials available was…

Presents a longitudinal analysis of school performance declines among neglected and abused children, using the maltreatment and school histories of 1,369 children in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. Significant relationships between maltreatment and declines in performance were found in diverse school outcomes. (SLD)

Describes a survey that compares entry-level job requirements to on-the-job performances of new hires. Looks at ways employers define job requirements, important skills for new hires, and compares performance requirements to preparedness. Reviews problems employers see in preparedness and ways schools can address these problems. (RJM)

Studies an information retrieval system for bibliographic entries or abstracts using queries from the INSPEC database on the FOLIO system at Stanford University (California). Highlights include strategies for distributing indexes across a set of processors and for performing queries in parallel; inverted lists; simulations; local area networks;…

Assesses etiology of reading disability as a function of mathematics performance by subjecting data from 168 same-sex twin pairs where at least one member was reading disabled to quantitative genetic analysis. Suggests that genetic factors may be especially salient as a cause of reading disability in children with borderline deficits in…

This study investigated the retention of stories by 20 children with mild mental retardation (MMR), 28 with learning disabilities, and 38 typical children (ages 10-13). The children with MMR recalled less than others, but all recalled story content with many connections on the causal chain better than content off the causal chain. (CR)

A new analysis of data from 15 cognitive tasks completed by 93 subjects with scores on the Cattell Culture Fair test show that differences in Cattell score systematically affected performance on some tasks more than on others. Implications for theories of local and global differences in mental ability are discussed. (SLD)

Using the pass rates of Black and Hispanic students on the Texas school exit assessment as a proxy for academic achievement, this study identifies educational and political resources that influence student success. Political resources are much more influential for the success of black students. Factors contributing to minority student success are…

Studied the meaning of Performance Failure Appraisal Inventory (PFAI; Conroy and others, 2002) by evaluating the comparability of PFAI factor structure over repeated assessments and the stability of the subscales over relatively brief intervals. Results for 356 college students generally show high stability for PFAI scores in long and short forms.…

This article examines evidence both for and against early specialization in the development of sports expertise and presents the early diversification approach as another path leading to elite levels of performance. It discusses sports dropout and questions the link between early sports specialization and exceptional sports performance. (Contains…

Two experiments yield data suggesting that the structure of children's concept of artifact function changes profoundly between age 5 and 7, with striking effects on problem-solving performance. This effect is not caused by differences in children's knowledge about the typical use of particular tools, but rather, is mediated by the structure of the…

Examined patterns of conceptual and procedural knowledge of addition in 5- to 8-year-olds. Found that children were more successful in noticing that addends had been reordered rather than decomposed and in noticing the decomposition of addends presented with objects rather than with symbols. Also found that profiles of procedural competence were…

Three experiments explored infants' attention to conflicting cues at different ages. Found when stress and statistical cues indicated different word boundaries, 9-month-olds used syllable stress as a cue to segmentation while ignoring statistical cues. Seven-month-olds attended more to statistical cues than to stress cues. Results suggested…

Examined children's and adults' perceptions of facial stimuli that were either systematically exaggerated (caricatures) or de-exaggerated (anticaricatures) relative to a norm face. Found that all ages perceived caricatures as the most distinctive version and anticaricatures as least distinctive; the smallest effect was for 6-year-olds. Caricatures…

Three experiments examined the memory-preserving effects of reactivation and reinstatement reminders following 6-month-olds' learning and forgetting of an operant task. Findings indicated that a single reactivation reminder extended infants' memory of an operant mobile task for 2 weeks, a single reinstatement extended it for 4 weeks. A single…