Personality structure,instructional outcomes,and instructional preferences

Four instructional treatments differing in structure and student responsibility were used with 60 abstractthinking and 60 concrete-thinking students. As predicted, abstract students preferred those treatments with less structure and more responsibility; however, abstract and concrete students showed similar achievement levels as a result, of each treatment. The differentiated outcomes hypothesis is offered to account for the findings.

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Résumé Quatre méthodes de traitement pédagogique de structure et de responsabilité des étudiants ont été employées avec 60 étudiants pensant abstraitement et 60 étudiants pensant de manière concrète. Ainsi que prévu, les étudiants pensant abstraitement préféraient les méthodes ayant moins de structure et plus de responsabilité. Les deux catégories d'étudiants ont toutefois obtenu des niveaux d'accomplissement pareils avec chaque méthode de traitement. L'hypothèse des aboutissements différenciés est offerte comme explication des conclusions.

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This study was based in part on the doctoral dissertation of the junior author. The authors would like to thank the students and staff of the County College of Morris, Morristown, N.J., for their cooperation.     

Perceptual training of height and brightness seriation in kindergarten children.

A study of seriation was conducted from the perspective of Gibson's theory of perceptual development. Kindergarten children who evidenced little seriation of height or brightness were assigned to either 1 of 3 perceptual training conditions or to a fourth, control condition. Training consisted of nonreinforced same-different judgments to wooden dowels varying in height, or in brightness, or simultaneously in height and brightness. The theoretical rationale for this training was that it would facilitate perception of the stimulus dimension(s) on which the dowels differed. It was found that perceptual training did facilitate seriation, particularly if both the height and brightness dimensions varied simultaneously in training.     

Dimensional salience and judgments of bigness by three-year-old children.

3-year-olds were shown triads of rectangles and asked to select the "big" one, where the biggest rectangle in each triad was neither the tallest nor the widest. Dimensional salience and response choice were highly related. In addition, as saliency of a particular dimension increased relative to the other dimension, significantly more responses were based on that dimension. The results support the notion that the young child does not rely on 1 specific dimension to make judgments of bigness but, rather, attends to the most salient differences among stimuli.     

A developmental analysis of the relationship between response strength and punishment

Two levels of training (100 vs. 500 trials) and two ages of rats (young and adult) were used in a developmental analysis of the relationship between response strength and the effects of punishment. The apparatus was a Y maze with three discriminably different arms. After 100 or 500 reinforced trials, subjects were shocked each time they responded in one arm. The recovery sessions followed the punishment session. Results from the punishment day indicated that: (a) young rats received a greater amount of shock, and (b) additional training increased the amount of shock received by the young but decreased it in the adults. The recovery data showed that: (a) the suppressive effects of punishment were greater for the adults than for the young, and (b) the recovery scores were not influenced by degree of overtraining. The Age by Overtraining interaction suggested that the relationship between response strength and punishment is age dependent. The age differences found with the amount-of-shock and recovery measures provided additional support for the position that younger rats are less competent than adult rats in inhibiting responses.