Although methods for estimating item difficulty are abundant, little attention has been given to the psychological processes involved when a student responds to a single test item. Mastery of educational objectives is not proven when a student supplies the correct answer to items intended to test these objectives. The student's problem solving…

This paper presents an overview of the knowledge afforded man from research into personality. Approaching his topic from a position valuing the study of persons from complementary psychological perspectives, the author attempts to derive some conclusion about human behavior and personality. He discusses the findings that there is basic continuity…

This study was designed to determine whether adults' memory for pictorial and word stimuli might be differentially affected by age. Twenty female secretaries, median age 22.1, and 20 female members of a senior citizens' center, median age 69.4, were asked to learn lists of pictorial and word stimuli under free recall conditions. Eight trials were…

The performance of 75 congenitally blind and 75 sighted subjects (6- to 18-years-old) was compared on 32 Piagetian measures of reasoning, moral judgment, and moral conduct. Among major findings were that blind Ss did not achieve the reasoning processes characteristic of concrete operational thought with the facility or completion that would be…

Discussed is a paradigm for special education diagnostics of Area 1 or cognitive functioning as related to the Structure of Intellect (SOI) model. Research is reviewed and several individual profiles are provided to illustrate the method of curriculum planning from individual SOI profiles. It is concluded that the paradigm offered may help to…

This paper is primarily concerned with Basil Bernstein's sociolinguistic account of school failure. The first section describes some earlier work relevant to his theories. In the second section, Bernstein's sociolinguistic codes thesis is described, and an attempt is made to show that it suffers from the merging of two logically distinct strands…

The author considers memory as being composed of four categories. The fourth category--metamemory--refers to the individual's knowledge and awareness of memory or of anything pertinent to information storage and retrieval. It is that aspect of memory that deals with the how and what of memory itself. The paper first presents a model of what could…

This study explores the cognitive dimensions used by children in differentiating among television characters. Similarity judgments between all possible pairs of 14 television characters were analyzed using INDSCAL, a multidimensional scaling method which allows for individual or subgroup differences in scaling solutions. By linking the results of…

The purpose of this booklet is to provide a summary of perception research and to suggest practical applications which will improve students' and teachers' communication ability. The "theory" section of this work is devoted to the definition of perception as a selective process, dependent on such factors as acuity of sensory equipment,…

Individual differences in the ordered recall of list of digits are examined experimentally. The resulting evidence argues that neither differences in rehearsal strategies nor differences in the tendency to group and chunk the digits are major determinants of differences in digit span size. Further experiments attempt to pinpoint the source of…

The primary focus of this paper is on black children and the relationship between their productive and receptive language competencies. The solutions which have been proposed to solve the dilemma of black pupils' poor reading achievement are discussed. It is noted that none of the proposed solutions has the unqualified support provided by a mass…

Three extrinsic factors were manipulated in a problem-solving task performed by 80 ten-year-old children of I Q 90-110. The factors were: the presence or absence of the name of the concept given in feedback, specific instructions, and whether the child was allowed to verbalize. The task was a modification of Vygotsky's experiment on concept…

Cognitive dissonance theory assumptions were used in a formal program of attitude change. The objective was first to improve subject attitudes toward an instructional activity, then subject achievement in this instructional activity was measured to determine if achievement was influenced by subject attitudes toward instruction. Two hundred…

After receiving a sample shock, subjects in a Threat Condition were told that they would receive additional painful shocks while subjects in a Nonthreat Condition were not threatened with additional shocks. Subjects in an Avoidant Thinking Condition were then instructed to read and think about an amusing story, subjects in a Situation Redefinition…

Compound and coordinate bilinguals equally competent in French and English were compared to determine their ability to uncover key concepts, i.e., music, when such words as song, piano, sound, instrument or musician were introduced in both languages. Recent research tends to support the theoretical contrast established between compound and…