This curriculum on aging is designed to help promote positive attitudes toward age and aging among young children. It focuses on developing the concepts of: (1) aging is a natural and lifelong process of growing and developing; (2) old and young are similar in many ways; (3) older people are valuable and contributing members of society; (4) old…

A total of 103 preschool children of lower and middle socioeconomic status families were observed in three preschool programs during 15 standardized free play periods for the purpose of investigating preschool children's preferences for different types of traditionally used play materials. The influence of age, sex, and socioeconomic status (SES)…

Research on adult learning shows that there is no decline in ability to learn as people get older, that except for minor considerations such as hearing and vision loss, the age of the adult learner is not a major factor in language acquisition, and that the context in which adults learn is the major influence on their ability to acquire a new…

Higher income households spend more per person on most food groups, especially beef, fish, cheese, vegetables, butter, and alcoholic beverages, than do lower income households. Elderly Americans spend less than younger people on food away from home and on alcoholic beverages. Households in the Northeast and West spend more on food than those in…

The influence of age at adoption, ethnic background, sex of adopted child, and social class of adoptive parents on the intellectual, emotional, and social development of adopted children was studied. An intragroup comparison showed that the variables studied had very little relevance. Comparison with a control group showed no significant…

A fundamental principle of second language acquisition is stated and applied to language teaching. The principle states that learners acquire a second language when they receive comprehensible input in situations where their affective filters are sufficiently low. The theoretical background of this principle consists of five hypotheses: the…

Two studies were conducted to determine the effects of specific learning centers on preschoolers' functional uses of language. It was hypothesized (1) that different centers would elicit different functions of language and (2) that contexts which promote fantasy play would elicit more multifunctional utterances than would other contexts. In the…

The effects of being six months younger than grade level were studied using seventh through twelfth grade students in Montgomery County (MD) Public Schools. The racial, sexual, and academic characteristics of the accelerated students and the effects of age/grade differences on selected academic areas and social activities were examined using…

The general question of how well parents' reports about their preschool children predict school performance was addressed in this study. In addition, the effects of several population characteristics--sex, socioeconomic status (SES), child's age, and birth order--upon the validity of parent reports were investigated. Parents of 391 preschool…

An investigation examined teachers' perceptions of nonverbal behaviors of their students within a developmental paradigm. A questionnaire was sent to 901 elementary and secondary school teachers from a 4-state area. It asked teachers to estimate the percentage of students who engaged in 24 nonverbal classroom behaviors of 4 general types:…

To determine whether older students make more revisions in their essays, more kinds of revisions, or "bigger" revisions than younger students, a study was made of revisions made by 30 randomly selected seventh grade and 30 randomly selected eleventh grade students. Students were asked to write and revise twice essays in which they described a…

A study of early identification ratings gathered on six cohorts of kindergarten children (N = 14,793) over the school years 1978-79 to 1983-84 revealed substantial relationships between these ratings and students' sex, socioeconomic status, and month of birth. The relationships of early identification ratings in the area of language to these three…

The relationship between locus of control and value orientation was studied in adult teacher education majors. The Rotter Internal External Locus of Control Scale and Rokeach Value Survey were administered to 413 undergraduate and graduate students ranging in age from 18 years to over 50. Demographic data were also collected. The results showed…

Language tests were administered by videotape to 27 deaf children taught to sign English. The tests, one in manual English (ME) and the other in American Sign Language (ASL) each included twelve grammatical distinctions: two aspects of adjectival modification (opposition and ordering), two types of pluralization (is/are and indicative in ME, dual…

This paper explores the developmental changes in meaning and purpose across the life course. Thirty males and females at the developmental stages of young adulthood (16-29 years), early middle-age (30-49 years), late middle-age (50-64 years), young-old (65-74 years) and old-old (75+ years) completed the Reker and Peacock (1981) Life Attitude…