Background: According to Dweck and colleagues, praise can be delivered using person ("you are clever") or process terms ("you worked hard"). Research suggests that giving people process praise after success can help them deal better with subsequent failures because it attributes outcomes to effort rather than fixed ability. However, research has…

Background: Teacher expectations have been a fruitful area of psychological research for 40 years. Researchers have concentrated on expectations at the individual level (i.e. expectations for individual students), rather than at the class level. Studies of class level expectations have begun to identify specific teacher factors that make a…

Background: Academic procrastination, the tendency to postpone learning activities, is regarded as a consequence of postmodern values that are prominent in post-industrialized societies. When students strive for leisure goals and have no structured routines for academic tasks, delaying strenuous learning activities becomes probable. Aims: The…

The classical twin method -- comprising comparisons of monozygotic (MZ) and dizygotic (DZ) twins -- in the domain of cognitive abilities and attainments has led to wide acceptance of results suggesting a large amount of additive genetic variance, with far-reaching implications both for the nature of future studies on the causes of cognitive…

Repertory grids were used to monitor the development of student teachers' conceptions of their professional roles. (Editor)

As a result of eight years' experience of Piagetian research and subsequent work as a practicing psychologist, certain aspects of Piaget's theories are criticized. In particular the existential status of operatory structures, the relation between logicality and understanding, and the representativeness of the tasks are questioned. (Editor)

The relationships between Piaget's theory and education are discussed. The accumulated data from studies based upon the theory are examined in terms of (1) shared assumptions which govern the interpretation of replication studies, (2) the extent to which a stage can be meaningfully defined, and (3) the nature of the developmental process proposed…

The production of informationally redundant choices in a selection concept attainment task was investigated in relation to age and intelligence, using 62 adolescents aged 12:7--15:6 drawn from the lower middle ability range of a comprehensive school. (Editor)

Teaching procedures designed to improve children's divergent thinking abilities were administered to two classes of 9- and 10-year-old children, one formal and one informal. Results suggest that appropriate teaching procedures can play a significant part in enhancing children's divergent thinking abilities, particularly verbal abilities.…

An analysis of the written compositions of a national sample of 520 British school children was carried out using two measures: (1) writing productivity as measured by the composition length in words and (2) the mean minimal terminable unit (T-unit) length in words, a measure of syntactic maturity. (Editor)

The assumptions of Jensen's theory of Level 1 ability are examined in the light of recent research on memory. Experimental studies of organization in both serial and free recall, as well as factor analytic investigations of sequential memory indicate that the current theory requires revision in order to accommodate recent findings. (Editor)

This research represents an attempt to look closely at the actions which children are expexcted to perform in the early stages of reading and writing when taught by systematic methods, containing a phonic ingredient. (Author)

Three important deficiencies of learning hierarchy validation studies - inadequate scope, inappropriate validation technique and lack of replicative data - were identified, and substantially resolved in the construction and replicate validation of a comprehensive network of graphical interpretation skills. (Editor)

Two experiments were conducted in which first-year students were asked to read a passage of prose under different conditions, chosen to represent realistic study strategies. (Editor)

Elementary-level children were asked to coordinate perspectives on spatial stimuli with a normal observer, a blindfolded observer, and an inanimate doll observer. The lowest overall, as well as egocentric error rates, were noted for the normal observer condition with the remaining two conditions yielding similar trends. (Editor/SJL)