Study investigated whether the proportion of examinees who answer an item correctly may be influenced by the difficulty of the immediately preceding item. (Authors/MB)

Shows that, contrary to Piagetian Theory, formal thought in a variety of subject matters is not possible until sufficient requisite concrete background experience in each content area involved has been attained. (MH)

Differences in instructional sets did not yield any differences in learning. (AP)

Determined the readability of large circulation, metropolitan newspapers in 11 different languages using the formula of sentence length plus word length. Swedish language newspapers were the most readable, Russian language newspapers the lease. (AEA)

The Raygor Readability Estimate, described in this article, is much like the widely used Fry Readability Graph, except that it determines vocabulary difficulty by counting words of six or more letters, rather than by counting syllables. An evaluation found that Raygor was faster and easier to use and more objective than the Fry method. (RM)

To rate 40 validated educational projects from the National Diffusion Network and Georgia, an instrument was developed to identify and measure four dimensions of project complexity: (1) need for teacher creation of project elements; (2) need for administrative arrangements; (3) need for a new analysis of pupil needs; and (4) need for involvement…

Investigates the effect of feedback delay in computer-assisted instruction on short- and long-term retention of mathematical material, by college students. Difficulty level of material and original learning are also considered. Results show that a delay in feedback may have a detrimental effect on retention. (Author/JJD)

A set of four experiments investigates the relationship between phonological coding and reading ability, using a picture-word interference task and a decoding task. Results with regard to both adults and children suggest that while poor readers possess weak decoding skills, good and poor readers show equivalent evidence of direct semantic and…

Practical suggestions are given for teachers wanting to improve classroom computer assisted instruction, including the use of title, instructions, error-proofing responses, feedback, prompts, remediation, personalization, scorekeeping, levels of difficulty, timing, and variety. (Author/MSE)

Tested the hypothesis that increased task difficulty elicits more efficient problem-solving strategies from older adults, using "Twenty Questions" tasks with either 64 or 10,000 possible solutions. Although younger adults were more efficient, there was not evidence that task difficulty affected problem-solving for either age group. (Author/JAC)