Art instruction and the Goodenough-Harris drawing test in fifth-graders

The experiment was conducted to assess the effect of ordinary school art instruction in human figure drawing on scores of the Goodenough-Harris Drawing Test. Subjects consisted of 44 fifth-grade students attending a suburban parochial school who were members of two preexisting, randomly assigned homeroom classes. Both classes were taught two lessons in art by their regular teachers. The treatment group was taught human figure drawing, and the control group had art lessons excluding figure drawing instruction. The Drawing Test was administered three times, one preinstruction and two postinstruction administrations. Absenteeism reduced treatment and control groups to 14 and 17 subjects, respectively. As predicted, no differences were found in the control group between pretest and postests. The treatment group showed significant gains on both posttests, as well as a significant decline from the first posttest to the second posttest.     

Are teachers' beliefs incongruent with their observed classroom behavior?

The study forcuses on an on-going question of whether teachers' beliefs are incongruent with their observed classroom behavior. The setting for the study is a Protestant high school in a large southwestern city. In particular, two teachers are studied. Elicitational questioning and classroom observations are used as procedural methods for data collection. Congruency/incongruency is determined qualitatively, i.e., by comparing observed patterns of teacher classroom behavior with their elicited beliefs. Findings indicate that congruent and incongruent beliefs must be understood in terms of a clustering effect of beliefs in belief systems. Moreover, such findings can be used in understanding teacher decision making processes and classroom teaching strategies.     

Attending to spatial locations: a developmental study

In 2 experiments, 7- and 8-year-old children and college students performed a letter-detection task in which reaction time was the dependent variable. Expectancy was manipulated by varying the probability the stimulus would appear at the center of an imaginary circle rather than along the perimeter. Although both age groups responded consistently faster to stimuli presented in expected locations than to stimuli presented in unexpected locations, this expectancy effect was larger for the children than it was for the college students. In a third experiment, these results were replicated using a luminance-detection task with 5-year-olds, 8-year-olds, and college students as subjects. It was concluded that children as well as adults are able to expand or contract the breadth of their attentional focus in accordance with task demands and that there is a developmental change in the efficiency with which a stimulus presented in an otherwise empty field can be located. Furthermore, it was suggested that children may be more disrupted by the occurrence of an unexpected event than adults are.     

Children's understanding of the distinction between intentions and desires

Much of the previous research on children's understanding of intentions confounded intentions with desires. Intentions and desires are different, in that a desire can be satisfied in a number of ways, but an intention must be satisfied by carrying out the intended action. Children 3 through 7 years of age and adults were presented with situations in which intentions were satisfied but desires were not, or vice versa, in a story-comprehension task (N = 71) and a target-hitting game (N = 45). Although 3- and 4-year-olds were unable to differentiate desires and intentions consistently, 5- and 7-year-olds often matched the adult pattern. Younger children's difficulties in understanding intentions are discussed in terms of their use of a desire-outcome matching strategy and the representational complexities of intentions.     

Literacy skills of welfare recipients

Illiteracy is considered to be a significant barrier to employment. Programs are being established to require literacy education and work programs of welfare recipients. The purpose of this study was to determine the literacy skills of a random sample of welfare recipients. One-hundred and six welfare subjects were administered theWoodcock-Johnson Psycho-Educational Battery and a comprehensive interview form. Using common criteria to separate the sample into the literate and functionally illiterate, the groups were found to differ significantly on intellectual capabilities. It was concluded that illiteracy is associated with subaverage intellectual functioning among persons on welfare. A number of recommendations were made pertaining to policy.