Examined development of infants' relational coding in spatial orientation problems. Found that 6-month-olds performed poorly in a peekaboo task in which they had to turn to a target after displacement to a novel position and direction. Twelve- month-olds solved the tasks whether or not target was located between two landmarks; 8.5-month-olds…

Discussion of performance improvement focuses on the effect of emotions on performance. Topics include the emotional intelligence of the performers; how people deal with emotional demands and the stress of their performance; and emotional states that affect attention, focus, perception, and time on task. (LRW)

Two studies examined age differences in conditional reasoning. Results indicated that 8-year-olds performed better when antecedents were weakly associated with consequents than on strongly associated antecedent/consequents, with no difference among 11-year-olds. Eight-year-olds did better on ad hoc premises than on causal premises, with no…

Two experiments examined effects of content and rhetorical prompts on undergraduates' writing processes and the quality of their writing. Found that content prompts extended time spent writing and related to improved text quality. Rhetorical prompts demonstrated some influence on planning and global text quality only when presented during domain…

A review of empirical investigations of effects of goal setting on task performance of persons with mental retardation found that use of goal setting strategies, in conjunction with other instructional strategies, was associated with increased rate or accuracy of performance of both children and adults with mild to severe mental retardation.…

Examined influence of object labels and shape similarity on 16- to 21-month-olds' inferences. Found that infants generalized non-obvious property of unlabeled objects to test objects with highly similar shapes. For objects labeled with novel nouns, infants relied on shape similarity and shared labels to generalize properties. For objects labeled…

Discusses the trend toward short tenures for state university presidents, and indeed, for all university presidents, and concludes that evaluations make little difference in decisions to retain or remove presidents. Annual reviews or reports are considered valuable in improving the performance of university presidents. (SLD)

Three experiments tested 21- and 27-month olds' ability to construct a path to a mentally re-presented goal. After seeing the goal-state configuration of problems, both age groups evinced planning. Demonstration of initial solution step was less effective than goal-state exposure. Even with specification of a greater proportion of the goal path,…

Examined children's tendency to make argument structure overgeneralization errors. Found that 3- to 8-year-olds were more likely to overgeneralize verbs less familiar to them, supporting the hypothesis that verb usage in particular construction types becomes entrenched over time. As children learn transitivity status of particular verbs, they…

Discusses the selection process when using outside professionals for school construction projects. The drawbacks of using competitive bidding for professional services are highlighted followed by tips on using a qualifications-based selection method that includes work-experience evaluation and conducting interviews for professional services. (GR)

Identified methods that six federal agencies reported using to verify and validate performance data used in complying with the requirements of the Government Performance and Results Act. Developed a framework containing four major approaches to assessing and improving data quality. (SLD)

Monitored college students' eye movements while they produced the sentence frame "The A and the B are above the C" to describe three pictured objects, with B or C varying in codability and frequency of the dominant name. Found that speakers gazed longer at lower codability and lower frequency objects before naming them. (Author/KB)

Most accounts of the Stroop effect (Stroop, 1935) emphasize its negative aspect, namely, that in particular situations, processing of an irrelevant stimulus dimension interferes with participants' performance of the instructed task. In contrast, this paper emphasizes the fact that, even with that interference, participants actually can (and…

In accounting for the well-established sex differences on mental rotation tasks that involve cube stimuli of the Shepard and Metzler (Shepard & Metzler, 1971) kind, performance factors are frequently invoked. Three studies are presented that examine performance factors. In Study 1, analyses of the performance of a large number of subjects…

In everyday tasks, selecting actions in the proper sequence requires a continuously updated representation of temporal context. Previous models have addressed this problem by positing a hierarchy of processing units, mirroring the roughly hierarchical structure of naturalistic tasks themselves. The present study considers an alternative framework,…