To examine the hypothesis that children's difficulties on traditional perspective-taking tasks are in part due to intellectual realism (inappropriately including what is known to exist in a representation of what is seen), 60 three-, four-, and five-year-old children were asked to select representations of various arrangements of blocks.…

The speech of five stutterers ranging in age from 3 years, 10 months to 5 years, 7 months was analyzed to determine the types of loci of stutterings. The results related to the hypothesis that early stuttering represents mainly a type of difficulty in either the formulaton or the execution of syntactic units. (Author)

The use of high-level questions increased the high-and low-level understanding of fifth graders. Competitive environments produced significantly greater high-level understanding than did cooperative environments. (Editor)

Suggests that certain kinds of writing assignments encourage children to engage in writing at a higher than usual level of syntactic complexity. (DD)

The transition of speed into accuracy was investigated by studying different degrees of transformation in a task requiring different numbers of simple exchanges. Results with 100 university students indicate that accuracy is associated with cognitive ability to a greater extent in complex tasks than in simple tasks. (SLD)

Attempts to design a valid and reliable instrument to measure the difficulty of solo vocal repertoire. Presents the Ralston Repertoire Difficulty Index (RRDI), and determines the RRDI's ability to be used by voice teachers of all experience levels and to discriminate songs' difficulty into levels. (DSK)

Derives a general formula for the population parameter being estimated by the Mantel-Haenszel differential item functioning (DIF) statistics. The formula is appropriate for uniform or nonuniform DIF and can be used regardless of the form of the item response function. Shows the relationship between this parameter and item difficulty. (SLD)

Examined the performance of DIMTEST, through simulation, for unidimensional and two-dimensional data that exhibited ceiling effects generated through changes in location and scale of the theta distribution. Results indicate that the power of DIMTEST is reduced as the location shifts upward and the scale shifts downward. Considers the selection…

Purpose: To extend formal models of language learnability to applications in clinical treatment of children with functional phonological delays. Method: The focus of the narrative review is on phonological complexity. This follows from learnability theory, whereby complexity in the linguistic input to children has been shown to trigger language…

The Assessment of Basic Learning Abilities (ABLA) test requires a tester to attempt to teach to a person, using standard prompting and reinforcement procedures, six tasks that are hierarchically ordered in difficulty. Performance on the test provides valuable information for teachers and rehabilitation workers to match the difficulty of training…

Purpose: E. Bialystok and E. B. Ryan (1985) have outlined two operations, analysis and control, which are required for grammaticality judgments. In this model, analysis is involved in determining the grammaticality of a sentence, and control is required so that irrelevant information is ignored. This study examined these processes in specific…

The paper will discuss research insights into student academic goals. Cognitive psychologists have found that effective goal setting procedures involves establishing specific and challenging learning objectives. Students who set difficult goals must be persistent while facing the risk of potential failure that could diminish their intrinsic…

This technical report describes the development of progress monitoring measures in the area of Reading Comprehension. Measures were developed for grades 6 through 8. Twenty alternate forms of each measure were created. Passages were written by graduate students and reviewed by the lead author, as well as teachers and panels of graduate students.…

Computer aided instruction (CAI) encompasses a broad range of computer technologies that supplement the classroom learning environment and can dramatically increase a student's access to information. Criticism of CAI generally focuses on two issues: it lacks an adequate foundation in educational theory and the software is difficult to implement…

The first purpose of this study was to investigate whether the visuospatial working memory (VSWM) skills of 15-16-year-old pupils with difficulties in mathematics differ from those of their normally achieving peers. The goal was to broaden the view of the complex system of VSWM. A set of passive and active VSWM tasks was used. The study's second…