Research supported by a grant form the U.S. Office of Education, Bureau of Research

The purpose of this study was to relate children's cognitive processing capabilities and their grade level to their performance and to the strategies they used when working addition and subtraction problems. From two sets of data which assessed memory capacity and cognitive processing capacities, six groups of children with different cognitive…

The focus is on the problem-solving behaviors of primary age children on one-step verbal or story problems involving addition and subtraction. When children are given a simple word problem for which they have not learned the necessary algorithms, they are often able to derive a solution on their own. This report focuses on the child-invented…

Previous studies have found that an object can be categorized faster at a basic level (hammer) than at either a subordinate (club hammer) or a superordinate level (tool). While some attribute this result to basic categories having more distinctive attributes, other factors might cause this result. For example, basic categories routinely have…

A study focused on those factors that typically characterize television viewing--those ground rules for processing that are relatively immutable and those that vary in accordance with situation and contextual cues within the environment. Sixty fifth grade students were randomly assigned to one of four treatment groups. Members of all four groups…

Learned helplessness has recently incorporated attribution theory to predict the specific occurrence/nonoccurrence of the motivational, cognitive and affective deficits characteristic of helplessness. College students (N=50) participated in a study to investigate the effects of a personal-universal helplessness manipulation on subsequent task…

THINKABOUT, an ITV series for grades 5 and 6 designed to teach thinking skills, has been used in Wisconsin since 1979. The purposes of this study, conducted in spring 1981, were to identify teacher and student outcomes from using the series, ways of helping teachers to better implement THINKABOUT, means of expanding the use of THINKABOUT, and…

Because many textbooks contain sparse headings or no headings at all, the effectiveness of having students generate their own headings while studying material from an introductory biology text was investigated. General psychology students (N=51) were randomly assigned to three groups: (1) Headings Generation, given instructions on creating a…

Evidence suggests that important gender differences may influence both the decision to divorce and the nature of the life crisis which is precipitated. Recently divorced male and female subjects (N=30) who were childless, between ages 25-35, and married between 2-10 years, were interviewed and completed questionnaires. Results indicated that…

Reading instruction is on the verge of a shift to a new paradigm that will be based on a new understanding of cognitive processes and will include five important tenets: (1) the best way to promote the emergence of reading behavior is to use interesting story books; (2) the primary cause of reading problems is too much instruction, too much…

The procedures described in this report are designed to help students both develop and apply effective behaviors for understanding expository text by means of gloss--a technique that involves the use of marginal notes and other intratext notations to direct readers' attention to places in the text where the application of specific skills and…

A study investigated the top-down and bottom-up reading skill patterns of 34 kindergarten children who, as precocious readers, were reading at or above the third grade level. The children were administered the reading comprehension subtest of a standardized achievement test, five subtests on an intelligence measure, and a battery of reading skills…