Child abuse screening: Implications of the limited predictive power of abuse discriminants from a controlled family study of pediatric social illness

The predictive value of a child abuse screening instrument on unselected populations is illustrated for varying hypothesized levels of child abuse prevalence in order to demonstrate outcome of a hypothetical national screening program. At any level of application, the prediction of false positives and false negatives suggests a low practical utility for an unacceptably high social cost.     

The role of objectives in guiding the organization of information learned from text

This study was designed to identify how objectives influence the organization of the information recalled from text. Three hypotheses were investigated: (1) that objectives affect the sequence of attention to information in text, (2) that they affect the sequence in which information is rehearsed during a review period, or (3) that they serve as a set of cues at retrieval. One hundred college students read objectives either before or after reading a passage (varying the opportunity for objectives to affect the sequence of attention). They then either had or did not have a review period (varying the opportunity to use objectives to sequence rehearsal and also varying the presence of the objectives in memory at the time of retrieval). One hundred more students read the passage in control conditions with objectives available throughout the reading or with no objectives available. Results showed that students given objectives after reading but before a review period had more clustering by objectives in free recall than did those who never saw objectives, supporting the hypothesis that organization by objectives occurs during rehearsal. No evidence was found to support the notion that organization by objectives occurs during encoding or retrieval phases.     

Change in strategy: The relationship of attribution,expectancy, performance,and satisfaction

The purpose of the study was to examine the degree to which change in examination preparation is related to measures of attribution, expectancy, prior performance, perceived success/failure, and satisfaction. Subjects were students in an intermediate graduate statistics course. Although performance is the single best predictor of change in preparation, three attribution measures and satisfaction contributed unique predictive variance. While expectancy was significantly related to change in preparation, it did not add uniquely to the multiple correlation.     

Alternative research paradigms in the analysis of mnemonics

Four types of comparisons for evaluation of mnemonics are identified, two based on equating exposure to the critical to-be-learned associations and two based on total study time. Two experiments on a new mnemonic, the cueword method, are reported, each of which incorporated three of the four comparison procedures. In general, the cueword method proved useful only in comparisons involving control of exposures to the critical to-be-learned associations. The experiments illustrated how highly analytical experiments on mnemonics can be conducted, and the results illustrated that choice of comparison in mnemonics research can greatly affect the evaluation of a mnemonic. General design suggestions for mnemonics research are made.     

Individual differences in memory: Theory,data, and educational implications

This paper examines two theoretical perspectives from which the issue of individual differences in memory can be viewed and relates the perspectives to evidence available in the literature. The paper also reports the results of two studies which bear upon the issue of whether there are individual differences in the retention of learned material. The last section of the paper examines the educational implications of one of the theories presented in the paper.     

Reconceptualizing perceptual development: The identification of some dimensions of spatial competence in young children

In this examination of young children's acquisition of geometric skills, spatial performances were conceptualized as specific combinations of actions applied within stimulus contexts. Since both actions and context can vary, a number of different combinations can be specified. In this study, the relationships among eight such combinations were examined and predicted patterns compared with observed ones. Fifty-four 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children were presented with 24 geometric displays depicting a variety of geometric relations. Subjects were required to either match or recall the displays in both a reconstruction and a recognition task format thereby responding across different types of action demands. The geometric displays depicted information organized either around a single axis (horizontal or vertical) or around both axes, the variation in context. The results of a mixed design ANOVA revealed a good fit with the hypothesized predictions. The findings are discussed in terms of the development of spatial skills, information theory, and of skill generalization.     

The role of fantasy figures in the regulation of young children's behavior: Santa Claus,the Easter Bunny,and donations

The present study examined the influence of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny on children's donations near the Easter season. Kindergarten and first-grade children were asked to tell stories about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, or pets, for which they received nine pieces of gum. They were then encouraged to donate any amount of their gum to handicapped children. Main effects were found only for grade, with first-grade children donating significantly more than kindergarten children. In addition, a significant interaction was obtained between grade and type of story elicited from the child. This interaction revealed that for kindergarten children, the type of story failed to influence donations, whereas for first-grade children, stories referring to Santa Claus increased donations relative to stories told about the Easter Bunny or pets.     

Factors related to third grade achievement: Self-perception,classroom composition,sex, and race

The purpose of this research was to investigate the relationship between self-perception and academic achievement among third grade black and white disadvantaged school children. Race, sex, IQ, self-perception, and student's perceptions of their teacher's perceptions were examined as sources of variance in academic achievement. Data from one-hundred-sixteen students were analyzed by means of stepwise multiple regression. Results suggest that self-perceptions account for more variance in academic achievement for students who are of the same sex and race as the teacher than for those who are not. Self-perceptions of black students in all black classrooms account for more variance in respect to achievement than do self-perceptions of black students in integrated classrooms.     

The role of stimulus salience in young children's ability to discriminate two-dimensional rotations: Reflections on a paradigm

Children's ability to discriminate reflections and rotations of visual stimuli was examined within the confines of a mental rotation task. It was hypothesized that success would be affected by both characteristics of the stimulus and by the subtlety of the discrimination required. Forty 3- to 4-year-old children were directed to mentally rotate a stimulus a given number of degrees and to discriminate the appearance of the rotated stimulus from among a set of alternatives. Four stimuli differing in the number of visual orientation cues were utilized across 24 trials. A significant effect was found for number of orientation cues, and data indicated the difficulty children experienced detecting reflections, a task which bears close resemblance to the yes/no option in prototypic rotation studies. Children were only successful with a limited range of stimuli when discrimination of a reflected foil was not required. Results are discussed in light of discrepant findings about children's kinetic imagery ability and the advisability of using this particular paradigm with young Children.     

The influence of decision factors on what is reported in free recall of a brief narrative

In recent research on memory for prose, attention has focused on the influence of a reader's perspective or schema on what is encoded and subsequently recalled. Previous research has revealed that subjects were able to recall previously unrecalled information if they were directed to take a new perspective during a second recall trial. This has been termed the perspective shift effect. This paper describes two possible mechanisms to account for the perspective shift effect—a retrieval process and a decision process. Two experiments which investigated the roles of these processes in the perspective shift effect are described. Experiment 1 employed an incentive to influence the subjects' criterion for reporting recalled information. Experiment 2 obtained separate estimates for decision and memory processes by applying signal detection theory. The results of both experiments provide data that tend to rule out the decision process as an important factor in the perspective shift phenomena in recall.     

The stage-learning hypothesis: Strategies for instructional design

According to the stage-learning hypothesis, children's ability to learn various concepts is constrained by their pretraining stages of cognitive development. Although this hypothesis has important instructional and theoretical implications, little progress has been made on obtaining unconfounded tests of the hypothesis. Some procedures for obtaining such tests are developed in this paper, and some applications to factorial experiments are considered.     

The effects of effort feedback and performance patterns on children's attributions and task persistence

This study examines the effects of performance patterns (ascending versus random) and attributional information regarding the causes of that performance (effort feedback versus no feedback) on attributions and task persistence. Subjects were 40 fourth and fifth graders with dispositional tendencies not to perceive effort as a cause of their school-related performance. Results indicated that performance patterns did not systematically influence either children's attributions or persistence. As predicted, children given effort feedback exhibited greater levels of task persistence than those given no feedback; unexpectedly, however, this effect was not mediated by children's attributions.     

Cheating: The illusory edge

This experiment studied the relationships among cheating, overall test performance, and the relatedness of materials available and unavailable to the cheater. Subjects learned a free-recall list and were then tested for recall either when cheating was impossible or when half of the list had been left “carelessly” exposed. For half of the cheat subjects the exposed and the unexposed words belonged to different categories, while for the remaining halves the items belonged to the same categories. Recall was scored for both exposed and unexposed words. The results indicate that significant cheating did occur, that cheating did not improve overall performance, and that while cheating elevated the numbers of recorded exposed words it depressed recall of stored unexposed items (for both related and unrelated sets). This associated cost effect is discussed in connection with category retrieval, output interference, attention, and arousal.