Experiments with 81 college students and 48 fifth graders investigated the role of one form of intra-word orthographic redundancy--the characteristic asymmetric spatial distributions of letters of the alphabet across serial positions within words. Adults were sensitive to letter positional distributions, as were fifth graders who were good…

Performance of over 200 third and fourth graders on a post test and a two-month follow-up measure showed that groups receiving lessons based on a task analysis instructional design performed significantly better than groups receiving placebo lessons at two levels of advanced mastery for the concepts, "equilateral triangle" and "tree." (Author/CP)

Research on teacher effects should be reconceptualized by a psychological model which incorporates human learning and information processing perspectives. Exemplary areas of research include teacher decision making strategies, student cognitive processes, and teacher-student interactions in the classroom. (CP)

Thirty undergraduate students discussed a moral issue with a confederate who held either the same or the opposing opinion. Subjects in the controversy condition indicated more accurate understanding of the confederate's reasoning than their counterparts; however, noncontroversy subjects erroneously believed they understood the confederate's…

A highly reproducible scale of difficulty of word identification tasks was identified for both good and poor readers: consonant-vowel combinations and short vowel words were learned first. Long vowel words, special rule words, and nonsense words were more difficult. Reading instruction should parallel this sequence since it follows learning…

The ability of an environmental process measure and socioeconomic status (SES) measures to predict Stanford-Binet IQ at 3 years of age was compared in a separate analysis by sex and race. The environmental process measure predicted IQ as well as a combination of process and status measures, and was superior to SES measures alone. (Author/CP)

Forty-seven Irish teachers rated their second-grade pupil's class positions in mathematics and reading in the Fall, just before administration of the Drumcondra Achievement Test Series, and re-rated all 1,566 pupils in May. In 10 percent of the cases, teachers raised their ratings after learning the test scores. (Author/CP)

In a sentence-completion task, eighty sixth-grade students were assigned specific difficult goals or general goals ("do your best"). Subjects received one of four levels of monetary incentive. Specific difficult goals produced higher performance than nonspecific across various incentive conditions, and maintained those levels when previously…

The multitrait-multimethod matrix technique, as compared to analysis of variance decomposition, provided a more precise picture of the validity and methods bias characteristics of a longitudinal data set. Data were derived from a three year study of British elementary children to inspect the relationships among three academic traits, as assessed…

Forty teachers, grades one to three, successfully manipulated the behavior of withdrawn children, using a socially desirable set of instructions under conditions of high teacher motivation to influence their target pupil's behavior. The teachers were unable to decrease inappropriate behavior in disruptive children. (Author/CP)

The superior retention of superordinate ideas over time was replicated in this study which demonstrated the construct validity of a recognition test based upon the structure of a prose passage. A link was made between existing data on memory for prose and past theory: Ausubel's subsumption theory and Craik and Lockhart's levels-of-processing…

High cognitive processing capacity (CPC) students were superior to low-CPC students in prose learning. Of the four learning modes--programmed instruction (PI), control, chunking study outline, and adjunct questions--PI was the most effective. Substantial CPC and performance correlations and poor long-term retention suggested that PI was not best…

The validity of seven extenuating circumstances which college teachers provided as explanations for poor ratings by their students was investigated. Class size was the only circumstance producing a statistically significant difference in student ratings of their instructors. (CP)

Using a forced-choice matching-to-sample procedure five factors were varied: position of phoneme; contrast between words; type of phoneme; redundant visual cue; and allophonic variation. Performance improved significantly after four days of training for all but allophonic variation. Redundant visual cue greatly improved performance during training…

Relationships between six home environment measures, achievement and intelligence tests were examined by stepwise multiple regression analyses for a sample of 60 eight-year old children. Home variables were most successful in predicting achievement test scores, less successful regarding culture-dependent intelligence test scores, and least…