The relation of amount of adult-directed activity to children's social, play, and task behaviors was examined for 141 children in 13 Head Start classes. (JMB)

Aggressive incidents were observed for 23 children in 2 preschool playgroups. Linear dominance hierarchies were constructed for each group and rank orderings on toughness were obtained. The rankings on perceived toughness correlated better with initiation of aggression than with observed dominance position. (JMB)

Contingent praise by classroom teachers was used to cue and reinforce cross-sex cooperative play in 2 nursery school classes of 4-year-old children. Results suggested that previous learning and/or current classroom contingencies may reinforce same-sex playmate choices when teachers do not deliberately reinforce play between boys and girls. (JMB)

Gender constancy was assessed at ages 4, 5, 6, and 7 for 314 economically disadvantaged children. Results yielded evidence for the sequential placement of a transitional phase in the development of gender constancy. (JMB)

A map-drawing task was used to test the effects of (1) presenting instruction at a cognitive level higher than that at which most of the students in the study were operating and of (2) presenting instruction to groups of students of differing cognitive levels. Subjects were 63 fifth grade students. (JMB)

A multivariate modification of the cross-lagged panel correlation paradigm was applied to data from 4 subgroups of students tested and retested in fifth, seventh, ninth, and eleventh grades on 16 essentially identical cognitive measures. Results suggested that the test of aural comprehension was tapping the causal factors involved in intellectual…

This study examined the effects of 3 situational contexts varying in demands for accuracy and speed on the performance of 45 kindergarteners and 45 second grade students on the Matching Familiar Figures test of cognitive style. (JMB)

This study examined the role of conceptual tempo in 4th graders' comprehension and appreciation of verbal jokes containing various types of linguistic ambiguity. (JMB)

This study was undertaken to ascertain which types of listener feedback lead to effective communication by observing how 4-year-olds adapt their speech to a peer listener during free play. (JMB)

This study examined the role of communicative explicitness, sex, and social class upon children's utilization of a wide variety of hesitation phenomena. Speech samples were analyzed for 20 children 5 years of age. (JMB)

Describes two studies designed to determine how children in first through third grades become aware of their failure to comprehend instructions. Results suggested that children's initial insensitivity to their own comprehension failure is due to a relative lack of constructive processing. (JMB)

This study examined the effects of two types of social modeling on the referential communication performance of 72 children in grades K, 2, and 4. Findings were discussed in relation to the process of referential communication development. (JMB)

Describes two studies which tested the hypothesis that short simple sentences addressed to children are the result of children signaling non-comprehension for longer, complex utterances. (JMB)

Hebrew-English bilingual children, monolingual English children, and Hebrew monolingual children ranging in age from 5 to 8 years were tested for flexibility in syntactic rule usage, symbol substitution, semantic knowledge, and nonverbal system understanding. (JMB)

First- and third-grade children were tested under six different instruction conditions which varied in how explicitly they cued a rehearsal strategy in a self-paced sequential-memory task. The type of strategy adopted was monitored with study time and overt verbalization measures. (JMB)