Effects of Mother-Infant Social Interactions on Infants'' Subsequent Contingency Task Performance

20 3-month-old infants participated in a nonsocial contingency task immediately following a social interaction with their mothers. A measure of the time the dyads spent in a state of vocal turn-taking predicted individual differences in the infants' subsequent performance on the contingency task. These results parallel the social transfer effects we reported earlier in which the turn-taking dimension of social structure was experimentally manipulated to assess its effect on a subsequent nonsocial contingency task.     

Cooperation and instruction in practical problem solving. Differences in interaction styles of mother-child dyads as related to socio-economic background and cognitive development

This article addresses the role of parents and children in the social construction of children's cognitive competence. A discussion of four approaches (i.e. Sigel, Wertsch, Wood, Diaz et al.) leads to the hypothesis that both the level of instruction content and the degree of cooperation in joint problem solving interactions with adults are related to children's cognitive development. This was tested in a study of 40 mothers and three-year-old children solving a practical problem. Coding videotaped interactions on a content and cooperation dimension yielded moderate to strong correlations with family's socio-economic status and children's cognitive level.     

The effectiveness of teaching science with pictorial analogies

This study used a conceptual problem solving test to investigate the effect of a series of pictorial analogies on the concepts of density, pressure, and atmospheric pressure in Year 8 classrooms. The analogies were taught following Glynn's teaching with analogies model. It was found that the students taught with the pictorial analogies scored significantly higher than their counterparts (p<01). In addition, the low achievers benefited more from this teaching strategy than did the high achievers. Further, qualitative analysis revealed that most of the students' alternative conceptions were from preexisting naive intuitions rather than arising from analog instruction.     

Community Child Care Inclusion: the development of two children

The development of two children with severe disabilities who were fully included in a community child care centre that implemented a developmentally appropriate play‐based curriculum is chronicled in this paper. The children's development was monitored over the course of a 9‐month school year using the traditional measure of a standardised assessment instrument, as well as monthly observations of the children in various play activities. The data are presented in a case study format and provide evidence that the children in this study made progress in all areas of development. The findings are important in that they show the children with severe disabilities progressed without intensive intervention, indicating that a play‐based curriculum utilising developmentally appropriate practice may provide an effective structure for the instruction of young children with disabilities.     

A short form of the WISC-R for gifted students

Much effort has been devoted to the derivation of short forms of intelligence tests. The present study was undertaken to develop a short form of the WISC-R for the intellectually gifted. The results confirmed previous findings that the Vocabulary and Block Design dyad comprise the best two-subtest short form. The present study indicated that the Similarities, Vocabulary, Block Design, and Object Assembly tetrad could be the most useful in time and reliability.     

A systematic evaluation of Glasser's techniques

This study was designed to determine the influence of in-service training in Glasser's Reality Therapy and Class Meeting techniques on teacher affective behaviors, student on-task behaviors, discipline, referrals, and student absences. The sample consisted of eight voluntary target teachers and eight comparison teachers. No significant changes in teacher and/or student behavior resulted from the in-service training.