A 3-year study involved having 19 fifth and sixth grade students attend school with Russian peers for 10 days and, later, having Russian students attend U.S. schools. Findings indicated that the Russian students perceived greater difficulty in a differentiated curriculum for gifted students than did the U.S. sample. (DB)

This study with 56 students (mean age 15 years) with mental retardation and 53 nonretarded students (matched for mental age) found that students with mental retardation were more likely to rely on all kinds of external cues (task-relevant, incidental, or misleading) in problem solving, especially when the preceding task had been difficult.…

This study of the haptic processing of 9 children with specific language impairment and 9 normal-language children (ages 5-7) found that both groups performed similarly when the response modality was tactile and task requirements were minimal and performed differently when response demands included cross-modal processing or increased symbolic and…

Comparison of problem preferences of six meaning-oriented and five number-oriented junior high school students found that the successful meaning-oriented students preferred solving multistep and nonroutine problems, whereas the less successful number-oriented students preferred simple routine problems. However, in graded situations all students…

Studies with 174 college students and 41 college faculty attempted to define trick questions and to determine whether students could distinguish between trick and not-trick questions. Evidence seems to suggest that the concept of trickiness is not as clear as some test construction textbooks indicate. (SLD)

Comparison of disfluent conversational utterances of 14 children who stutter and 14 children (mean age of both groups 52 months) who do not stutter found that for both groups, disfluency clusters were typically produced at clause onset and within the most complex linguistic contexts and that they reflect the effects of producing multiple syntactic…

Examined whether providing item review on a computerized adaptive test could be used by examinees to inflate their scores. Two studies involving 139 undergraduates suggest that examinees are not highly proficient at discriminating item difficulty. A simulation study showed the usefulness of a strategy identified by G. Kingsbury (1996) as a way to…

Describes the PMOSE/IKIRSCH document readability formula, which provides a measure of document complexity (looking at structure and density) of a wide array of different document types (including lists, schedules, tables, graphs, charts, indexes, time lines, maps, calendars, and forms). Discusses implications of the formula in terms of document…

The latency and amplitude of the P300, an event-related potential, during the performance of a memory-scanning task were used as indices of the efficiency of information processing that may mediate individual differences in intelligence. Results with 61 female college students contradict a pure speed of processing explanation of the relationship…

Used mathematics achievement data from the 1992 National Assessment of Educational Progress, the Third International Mathematics and Science Study, and the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 to examine the sex difference by item difficulty interaction. The predicted negative correlation was found for all eight populations and was…

A structured analysis of three basal readers written for grades 2-5 was conducted using the T-unit (any independent clause) as the primary unit of analysis. The number of T-units per 100 words, the number of words per T-unit, the number of clauses per T-unit, and the number of morphemes per T-unit (a new index of linguistic maturity) are reported.…

Two experiments used Headed Records memory model to examine preschoolers' performance on a variation of Perner's Smarties task, a false-beliefs test. Data indicated that when the computational demands imposed by the original task are reduced, young children can and do remember what they had thought about the contents of a tube even after its true…

Studied structures and relationships in one-step additive and multiplicative problems solved by 450 students in grades 2, 3, and 4. Results show that the facility ratio of the problems differs by structure, situation, and the sequence of data. The ability to solve one-step problems increases with age, but relative problem difficulty is grade…

An examination and comparison of reading materials intended for elementary and intermediate Italian second-language instruction looks at these aspects: the role of the "ancillary" reader in language instruction; selecting readers that facilitate achievement of the Standards of Foreign Language Learning; the dichotomy between literary and cultural…

Addresses the question of whether there are different characteristics and language performance conditions (involving assumed different levels of cognitive demand) associated with different levels of fluency, complexity, or accuracy in test candidate responses. Participants were pre-university students taking English courses. (Author/VWL)