School district size and student educational attainment: evidence from Denmark

This paper analyses the effects of the size of school districts on educational attainment of students after compulsory school in Denmark. Using administrative microdata for individual students and their parents, logit models for the probability of obtaining different levels of education are estimated where the explanatory variables include district size, per student expenditure, and a wide range of controls for family background and district socioeconomic characteristics. It is found that attending schools in districts with a population of less than 15,000 (corresponding to less than 1800 students in public primary and lower secondary schools) has negative effects on educational attainment later in life: The probability of completing a secondary education (upper secondary school or vocational education) or a further or higher education is reduced by approximately 3 percentage points compared to having attended primary and lower secondary school in a district with more than 15,000 inhabitants.     

Factors influencing the incidence of utilization deficiencies and other patterns of recall/strategy-use relations in a strategic memory task

Factors that influence the incidence of utilization deficiencies and other recall/strategy-use patterns on a strategic memory task were evaluated in two hundred and fourteen 7- and 9-year-old children. Both utilization deficiencies and the incidence of children showing increases in both recall and strategy use over phases were more likely to be observed on phase transitions involving prompting or when different lists of items were included on consecutive trials; in contrast, increases in recall in the absence of increases in strategy use were more likely to be found between trials consisting of the same stimulus items. This research clearly indicates that patterns of recall/strategy-use relations, including utilization deficiencies, vary meaningfully with the age of the child and a variety of contextual factors.     

The role of IQ, expertise, and motivation in the recall of familiar information

High- and low-IQ children in the first, third, and fifth grades performed two free-recall tasks: a sort-recall task with sets of categorically related pictures, and a class-recall task, with children recalling the current members of their school class. All children were deemed to be experts concerning the composition of their school class, but, unlike experts in other domains, had no special motivation associated with their expertise. Recall and clustering on both tasks were high. The high-IQ children performed better than low-IQ children only on the sort-recall task. IQ was significantly correlated with measures of performance on the sort-recall task but not on the class-recall task. The results reflect the fact that the memory benefits associated with being an expert (here, elimination of IQ effects) are related to the greater knowledge the expert possesses and not to factors of motivation.     

How Children Invented Humanity

I use the commentaries of Legare, Clegg, and Wen and of Frankenhuis and Tiokhin as jumping‐off points to discuss an issue hinted at both in my essay and their commentaries: How a developmental perspective can help us achieve a better understanding of evolution. I examine briefly how neoteny may have contributed to human morphology; how developmental plasticity in great apes, and presumably our common ancestor with them, may have led the way to advances in social cognition; and how the “invention” of childhood contributed to unique human cognitive abilities. I conclude by acknowledging that not all developmentalists have adopted an evolutionary perspective, but that we are approaching a time when an evolutionary perspective will be implicit in the thinking of all psychologists.     

Strategic and nonstrategic factors in gifted children's free recall

The present experiment contrasted the recall of gifted and nongifted middle-school children for sets of categorically related items. Subjects were given a single free-recall trial on each of two lists consisting of category-typical and category-atypical words. The typicality of the items for one list was based on each subject's unique typicality ratings, whereas the typicality of the items in the second list was based on adult norms. A preliminary category-rating task indicated that gifted students were somewhat more similar to adults in their ratings of category typicality than nongifted children. Recall was comparable between the gifted and nongifted subjects for typical items, but greater for the gifted subjects for atypical items. The latency between the recall of unrelated words was faster for the gifted than the nongifted children. Subjects were classified as strategic or nonstrategic on the basis of clustering and interitem latencies. Gifted subjects were less apt to be classified as strategic than nongifted subjects on the typical items of the self-generated list; there were no differences in the classification between the gifted and nongifted children for all other contrasts. These results were interpreted as indicating that the cognitive advantage of gifted relative to nongifted children is more apt to be in terms of nonstrategic rather than strategic functioning.     

In Search of a Metatheory for Cognitive Development (or, Piaget Is Dead and I Don't Feel So Good Myself)

With the waning of influence of Piaget's theory and the shortcomings of information-processing perspectives of cognitive growth, cognitive developmentalists lack a common set of broad, overarching principles and assumptions—a metatheory—to guide their research. Development biology is suggested as metatheory for cognitive development. Although it is important for developmentalists to understand proximal biological causes (e.g., brain development), most important for such a metatheory is an evolutionary perspective. Some basic principles of evolutionary psychology are introduced, and examples of contemporary research and theory consistent with these ideas are provided.     

Expertise, Aptitude, and Strategic Remembering

Second- and fourth-grade children were classified according to their knowledge of soccer (experts vs. novices) and IQ (high vs. low), and given 2 sort-recall tasks. One task included items related to the game of soccer and the other included items from familiar natural language categories. Previous research has shown that expertise in a subject can compensate for low levels of performance on text comprehension tasks. Our results, the first examining the effects of both expertise and intelligence on a strategic memory task, were that soccer expert children recalled more items on the soccer list but not on the nonsoccer list than soccer novice children. However, soccer expertise did not modify a significant effect of IQ level, with high-IQ children recalling more than low-IQ children for all contrasts. Interest in soccer was found to be related to expertise but did not contribute to differences in memory performance. The results demonstrate that the knowledge base plays an important role in children's memory, but that domain knowledge cannot fully eliminate the effects of IQ on sort-recall tasks using domain-related materials. That is, although rich domain knowledge seemed to compensate for low aptitude, in that low-aptitude experts performed at the level of high-aptitude novices, its effects were not strong enough to eliminate performance differences between high- and low-aptitude soccer experts.     

Training and Extension of a Memory Strategy: Evidence for Utilization Deficiencies in the Acquisition of an Organizational Strategy in High- and Low-IQ Children

143 9- and 10-year-old children were classified into high- and low-IQ groups and given 4 different sort/recall lists (baseline, training, near [immediate] extension, far [1-week] extension) to assess training and extension of an organizational memory strategy. All children received categorized items of moderate typicality for Phases 1, 3, and 4. For Phase 2, children were assigned to either a training or control group, with half of the children in each group receiving category typical items and the others category atypical items. Levels of recall, sorting, and clustering were greater in Phase 2 for high-IQ children, for the typical lists, and for trained children. Both the high- and low-IQ children trained with typical items continued to show high levels of recall on the near extension phase. No group of subjects maintained high levels of recall after 1 week, although levels of sorting and/or clustering on the extension trials remained high for all groups of subjects except the low-IQ control children. This latter pattern (elevated sorting/clustering with low levels of recall) is an indication of a utilization deficiency , a phase in strategy development when children use a strategy but gain little or no benefit in performance. The results provide evidence for IQ, training, and material effects in the demonstration of a utilization deficiency.