Students' interest in comparing their work to their peers' work was studied at different grade levels and in different motivating situations. The importance of the situational variables differed in two experiments on social comparison interest; awareness of the situational influences on motivation appear to increase with age. (GDC)

Three strategies for selecting number of instances needed to learn legal concepts were compared. An adaptive strategy required 25 percent less time and resulted in better post test performance than a partially adaptive strategy. The partially adaptive strategy was 16 percent more efficient than the nonadaptive strategy, and resulted in better…

Variables affecting intelligence test performance were investigated for black and white female secondary school students. Test atmosphere (evaluative or gamelike), tester expectation, and socioeconomic status of subject interacted significantly with race of subject in determining mean IQ. Subjects generally performed better with female examiners.…

Educable mentally retarded children were mainstreamed into regular elementary school classes. Experimental subjects worked on a multimedia project with four to six nonretarded classmates. After eight weeks of treatment, the nonretarded children's acceptance of their experimental peers improved significantly more than that of the control children.…

Four TV film versions of the same story were shown to fifth graders; the presentation format of each film varied. Different patterns resulted between initial mental skills and knowledge acquired from each format, depending upon whether the format called upon or supplanted the skill. (Author/GDC)

Children learned two linear function rules under varying conditions: presence vs. absence of pointing; visual cues (context vs. weight vs. both pictured); and a verbal-only baseline condition. A complex rule was learned as a transfer task. Visual cues aided both learning and transfer; pointing helped initial learning, but retarded transfer.…

Programmed textbooks were used to condition verbal repetoires relevant to motivation, test anxiety, and test wiseness in 118 sixth grade students. There was a significant effect on raw scores on an IQ post test. Students of lower intelligence made greater raw score gains than students with a higher IQ. (Author/GDC)

Disadvantaged children participated in a creativity-enhancing program at a summer camp. Immediately following the treatment and four months later, the experimental group showed significantly higher scores and creativity tests than the control group, who participated in regular recreational activities. The tutors and the games used are described.…

The effects of a prose passage's physical structure and semantic organization upon free recall performance was investigated. Passages, describing characteristics of fictitious countries, contained either five or nine paragraphs of varying lengths. Differences in the distribution of materials interacted with type of semantic organization to produce…

The subjects consisted of high and average ability high school students. Half selected their own task and half were assigned to a task based on their scores on Rotters's locus of control scale. Across all subjects, ability was found to be the only significant predictor of recall. (Author/BW)

Three kinds of information--a score, rank, or informal evaluation--were presented to subjects as feedback about their performance on a task measuring financial ability. Subjects receiving raw scores generally rated their ability lower than subjects receiving the other two types of information. (Author/BW)

While reading a passage, college students expecting an essay examination took notes on sentences of higher structural importance than those anticipating a multiple choice test. Note taking seemed to serve as both an encoding device and as an external storage mechanism, with the latter being the more important function. (Author/BW)

The stimuli in two artificial letter learning experiments varied in print size and dimensionality. Preschool children made the least errors when the stimuli were three dimensional, large print, and the children were directed to manipulate the letters. Replication with kindergarten children failed to show any differences among the treatments.…

Significant predictors of a positive attitude toward mainstreaming include: team teaching, years of experience (negative correlation), courses in diagnosing learning and behavior problems, previous special education teaching experience, special education courses, size of class, and inservice program experience related to exceptional children.…

Programing a computer is a problem-solving activity which can be categorized as formal procedure specification. The reported study focuses on the incidence and severity of errors committed by novice programers during the development and "debugging" of computer programs. (Author/BW)