Discusses creativity, play, and nonconformity in children, including the illusion of thought disorder or abnormality, and aspects of everyday creativity, health, and survival. Describes creative divergence, chaotic amplification, the evolution of information, and primitive cognitive processes. Concludes with a discussion of cognitive styles,…

Research has shown that attributional styles are affected by the attributor's culture, inferential goals, and level of cognitive processing. This study compares the attributions made in sports articles and editorials of newspapers published in Hong Kong and the United States. Implications for the mixed model of social inference are discussed. (LSR)

Investigates relations among students' interest in texts, self assessments, and comprehension performance. States that 31 college students read expository texts and--after providing an interest rating and a confidence rating in answering inferences generated from passages on domains--rated texts and completed true/false comprehension questions.…

Distinguishes two conceptions of sample and sampling that emerged in the context of a teaching experiment conducted in a high school statistics class. Suggests that the conception of a sample as a quasi- proportional, small-scale version of the population is a powerful one to target for instruction. (Author/KHR)

Presents and discusses examples that illustrate the nature and scope of elementary and middle school students' reasoning when they are faced with tasks that involve making inferences and predictions from data. Shows that the range in thinking is not so much dependent on age as on the experiences students have in data exploration. (KHR)

Argues that, given a document and a query, users first judge the document against the individual concepts in the query and then use some inferencing process to derive a compound judgment for the entire query. The research examines the relative effectiveness of probabilistic and fuzzy models at predicting users' compound judgments. (23 references)…

Discusses three topics related to interpretation of discriminant analyses (DA's): (1) partial F ratios and partial Wilks's lambdas for predictor variables in standard, step-down, and stepwise DA's; (2) relation of goals of classification to definition/evaluation of classification rules; and (3) significance tests for total hit rates in internal…

Describes 45 third graders'"dramatic literacy" and the modal sources for inferences. Finds that (1) the more children used visual cues, the more they used verbal and psychological cues; and (2) inferences about the play's theme were related to aural recall of thematic dialogue and what children reported learning from the play. (SR)

Results of five studies suggest that the availability of an object concept in sentences that preceded an unexpected story outcome was a critical determinant of the occurrence of an object inference. The thematic prominence of the object influences the use of the object in an inference. (RH)

Discusses the extent to which computers can understand natural language. Considers assertions that computers can be described as literate, and considers more generally the purpose of designing machines which perform like humans. (RS)

Solution of production or recognition format analogies requires identification of either the inference or mapping relation, but not both as postulated in Sternberg's theory. Additional findings concerning analogical reasoning processes, and a discussion of teaching implications, are included in this description of a study involving 41 eighth…

A quantitative model of belief revision and causal thinking using circumstantial evidence was assessed, using 36 undergraduate students in three experiments. The model assumes beliefs are revised based on a cascaded reasoning process that combines beliefs about the clue/possible cause relationship and the clue's forward and backward implications.…

Investigates student interpretation of research by asking samples of undergraduates, graduates, and faculty questions concerning the implications of random sampling and random assignment. Finds that random sampling is understood while the role of random assignment in interpretation of results is misunderstood. Concludes there is a need for…

Studied the emotional attributions which 60 children aged four-eight gave to a story figure who violated a moral rule. Results suggested a clear change from outcome-oriented toward morally oriented attributions to a moral wrongdoer between the different age groups. (RJC)

Reports on two experiments examining the influence of intensity (the quality of language indicating the speakers'/writers' attitude toward their topic) on inferential processing. Finds that high-intensity passages triggered inference making during recall more readily than did the texts low in intensity. (SR)