This practicum was designed to address attention deficit and hyperactive behaviors (ADDH) in the elementary classroom setting. The primary goal was to provide teachers with an effective intervention technique which requires little time and addresses the ADDH syndrome. A second aim was to increase teachers' understanding of the ADDH syndrome and…

Thirty grade 4 subjects were individually tested on a digit span test of working memory capacity (Case and Kurland) and the Reading Span Test (Daneman and Carpenter). The Reading Span Test was administered using sentences at a grade 2, grade 4, and grade 6 reading level. It was predicted that, as the decoding demands of the stimulus sentences in…

A developmental study investigated the pictorial and linguistic main idea identification skills of 104 students in second, fifth, and eighth grades. In the pictorial task, the subjects studied a complete picture story and ranked the effectiveness of four separate main idea alternatives at capturing the meaning of the story. Following the same…

The intended significance of text conventions must be understood if reasonably convergent text interpretation is to occur. If students can learn to recognize structural cues or signals, then they can group words into units with particular inner relationships. Expository text comprehension consists of integrating at least three structures: the…

Despite considerable work concerning relationships between cognition and language in the second year of life, these relationships remain obscure. Clarification depends on resolution in at least three major areas. First, studies should be expanded beyond the scope of cognitive prerequisite models that have been difficult to conceptualize and that…

Limits of graphic display design component variation based on cognitive tolerance for imprecision were investigated using compatibility functions. The compatibility function is an empirical definition of a perceptual category representing the grade of membership of an implied physical attribute into a corresponding conceptual category, measuring…

This book, describing the result of extended research on how charts/graphs convey information, develops a scheme for describing/analyzing information contained in graphs/charts. A psychological theory of knowledge of the reader and the mental events which occur in attempting to read a graphic display are the two focal points of the book. A…

Related research suggests that children may show some simple understanding of event covariations by the early elementary school years. The present experiments use a rule analysis methodology to investigate covariation judgments of children in this age range. In Experiment 1, children in second, third and fourth grade judged covariations on 12…

Group treatment based on cognitive-behavioral and social problem solving strategies has been found to produce significant improvement in aggressive children. To investigate the association between clients' initial behavioral and subjective characteristics and the degree of improvement displayed on behavioral measures over the treatment period, 76…

Using data collected from 44 college faculty members, a study investigated the personality characteristics of writers, the ways in which highly productive writers differ from less productive ones, differences in writing strategies, and underlying motivations to write. The subjects were all male, tenured faculty members of a midwestern university…

Self-report research has inconclusively linked complaints of poor memory functioning, memory performance, and intellectual ability with depression in older adults. In order to investigate more conclusively the correlation between these variables as well as to investigate the effect of age differences, 159 older adults (49 young-old, aged 55-70; 60…

Cognitive processes, particularly in regard to negative content schemata, seem to play an instrumental role in the development and maintenance of depression. In order to better understand the nature of negative schemata in depressed individuals, both depressed and nondepressed subjects participated in two studies in which they were required to…

Recent studies of self-referent cognition have demonstrated that people process information about themselves more efficiently than other kinds of information. To investigate latency effects in self-referent decision-making, 60 college students participated in a three phase study. In phase one, each subject chose the trait within a pair that best…

To measure how the complexity of a television image affects the viewer's ability to identify or recognize visual details within the image, two coders rated the form complexity of 30 public service announcements, basing their evaluation on the familiarity of the images in the announcements, the rate at which they presented new information, and the…

In an exploratory study of peak communication experiences (PCEs), 36 male and 50 female undergraduates from a speech communication course were asked to describe their PCEs using 19 descriptors derived from A. Maslow's model of the generalized peak experience. Two-thirds or more of both sexes used 10 of these 19 descriptors to characterize their…