A study examined the development of discourse cohesion in first language acquisition within a functional and cross-linguistic perspective. The analyses focused on how children introduce new referents in discourse across four languages: English, French, German, and Mandarin Chinese. The data base consists of narratives produced by children between…

Literature on race and age differences in college remedial and developmental studies students is surveyed, based on the current literature, including an ERIC search from 1980 to 1988, pertinent professional textbooks, and information provided by publishers. Separate sections on race and age differences are provided, and each section concludes with…

The timing of three key family formation events--first sexual intercourse, first conception, and first marriage--was compared for different levels of urbanization. The levels of urbanization considered were central cities, suburbs, nonmetropolitan urban places, and rural area. Data were taken from the National Survey of Family Growth, for which…

The purpose of this cross-national descriptive study is to measure the extent of children's sexual knowledge and sexual understanding at various ages and to identify what processes of thought children use in trying to explain biological functions and the phenomena of their own bodies as they grow and change. Sexual thinking is defined as thinking…

Six hundred, 4-, 5-, and 6-year-old bilingual, rural, and urban children from southwestern, midwestern, eastern, and southern United States participated in a national study of Spanish/English bilingual development. Half of these children completed the English version of CIRCO (1980) sub-test 10-C, a productive language measure that requires…

Past research has assumed that differences between parents and school officials on the topic of discipline are to be expected. Previous student rights research has also tended to focus on student reactions. To explore differences among students', teachers' and parents' perceptions of student rights, three studies were conducted. The first included…

Differential sex role socialization in Thailand was investigated, and the results were compared with trends observed in the literature based on samples from the United States. Two issues were of particular interest: socialization for aggression and severity of socialization. A sample of 1,896 Thai children, stratified according to sex, grade…

Data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience were analyzed to determine the unemployment experiences of four groups of workers from the labor force during a recent decade. The subjects were men who at the end of the decade were 26-34 and 55-69 and women who were 26-34 and 40-54 years of age. Information on unemployment…

This study examined what secondary students had learned from the television film "The Day After"--a dramatization of the possibility of nuclear war and its horrible consequences--and how they responded to it emotionally. A pre-test and two post-tests (one administered the day after students viewed "The Day After" and a second…

Although inflation has forced many older persons to find part-time employment or to continue working past their anticipated retirement age, stereotypes of aging may hinder the acceptance of older persons in the workplace. It is particularly important to assess attitudes toward the elderly in a working class population who will first feel the…

The Children's Fear Expression and Research Survey (Children's F.E.A.R.S.) is a new self-report measure of fear suitable for children in grades two through six. The survey is designed to meet current psychometric standards and to be useful in both clinical and research settings. Originally 200 test items were drawn from existing measures; from the…

Literature on children's singing development is largely skewed towards findings based on English-speaking children. The present study aims to fill the gap in research through an investigation of the effects of age, gender and language on the singing competency of Cantonese-speaking children. One hundred and twenty children aged 7 and 9 years…

Data derived from the 1970 National Fertility Study (NFS II included post-married women, information on all compositional factors for each respondent, and an 18-item section on sex-role ideology) were used to test the following hypotheses: farm women are more traditional in sex-role ideology than nonfarm women; the higher the sex-role…

Part of a year-long sociolinguistic study of teacher and pupil perceptions of classroom discourse, this study focused on the following methodological question: how might the approach selected for analysis of language as a linguistic system affect what is learned about language in a given social situation? Subjects were 165 children and their…

Results of a survey using a criterion referenced test of reading comprehension for a large sample of sixth and eleventh grade students throughout Texas are reported in detail. Details of the sampling design and of the test development are reported elsewhere. Results are reported in terms of the percent of students correctly answering three out of…