Components of attention during infants' manipulative exploration

The purpose of the project was to investigate attention in infants as they manipulate objects. It was hypothesized that examining, in contrast to other activity, reflects focused attention and active intake of information. The first study with 7- and 12-month-olds supported the hypothesis; examining declined with increasing familiarity, while other behaviors, such as mouthing and banging, did not, and examining occurred before other behaviors temporally. The latency to examine declined significantly with age. The second and third studies investigated the effects of age and familiarity on both latency to and duration of examining. Latency again decreased with age but did not change with increasing familiarity. In contrast, duration of examining did not vary systematically with age but declined sharply with familiarity. In a fourth study, latency to examine and duration of examining were related to different measures of attention at 3 1/2 years. The combination of results suggests that the latency and duration measures reflect different aspects of attention--a short-term reaction to object novelty and a more sustained response to the object and its characteristics.     

Birth order, family configuration, and verbal achievement

Two samples of National Merit Scholarship participants test in 1962 and the entire population of almost 800,000 participants tested in 1965 were examined. Consistent effects in all 3 groups were observed with respect to both birth order and family size (1st born and those of smaller families scored higher). Control of both socioeconomic variables and maternal age, by analysis of variance as well as by analysis of covariance, failed to alter the relationships. Stepdown analyses suggested that the effects were due to a verbal component and that no differences were attributable to nonverbal factors. Mean test scores were computed for detailed sibship configurations based on birth order, family size, sibling spacing, and sibling sex.     

Cognitive deficits in reading disability and attention deficit disorder

This paper presents data from three studies (a cross-sectional study of school-referred children, a test-retest study of subtypes of reading disabilities, and a study of a large, random sample of first graders) that focus on specifying the cognitive deficits associated with reading difficulties and separating them from those associated with attentional deficits. The cognitive deficits associated with difficulty in reading were consistent across samples, developmental levels, definitions, and subtypes of reading disabilities. With IQ, age, and sex controlled for, poor readers were significantly impaired on measures of naming and phonological awareness. The effects of attentional deficits were more variable and complex but were clearly separate from the reading disability effects.     

Identifying correlates of reabuse in maltreating parents

Forty-five abusive parents (40 mothers, 5 fathers) in treatment at a large, urban medical center's child abuse program were compared on 22 parent, child, and treatment variables posited to bear on reabuse. While no one variable by itself was strongly associated with reabuse, the data indicated that interactions involving several variables (e.g., income source, marital status, and the abuser's personal abuse history) significantly differentiated between reabusers and nonreabusers. Implications of the findings for research and clinical intervention are discussed.     

The relative impact of school‐wide positive behavior support on teachers’ perceptions of student behavior across schools,teachers, and students

School‐wide positive behavior support (SWPBS) is a systemic approach for implementing a proactive schoolwide discipline and for improving students’ academic and behavioral outcomes by targeting the school’s organizational and social culture. With a multilevel approach, the present study evaluates the relative effectiveness of SWPBS on teachers’ perceptions of the student behavior (N = 3,295) across schools, teachers, and children using a multilevel approach. We assessed teacher perception of student problem behavior five times during a 3‐year implementation of SWPBS in 23 Dutch schools. Multilevel analyses not only revealed a small increase in perceived prosocial behavior and a small decrease in problems with peers, but also different effects across children, teachers, and schools. Effects were stronger for girls and for students with higher severity of perceived problems at baseline. At teachers’ level, higher mean baseline severity of perceived problems was associated with the reduced impact of SWPBS on perceived emotional problems and problems with peers. At the school level, effects were stronger for regular schools as compared with special needs schools.