Adaptive Skills and Academic Achievement in Latino Students

Interventions developed to improve adaptive skills can improve academic achievement. The authors expanded this line of research by examining the relationship between performance on a state proficiency exam and adaptive skills classifications on the Behavioral Assessment System for Children, Second Edition parent and teacher reports. Participants included 392 Latino students, Grades 2–6 in a large urban school district. Ordinal regression models were used to assess relationships between student academic proficiency level and adaptive skills classifications. Students classified as having higher adaptive skills by teachers were more likely to be classified as proficient or higher in reading and mathematics. These findings further support the relationship between adaptive skills and academic achievement. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.     

Hemispheric lateralization of the EEG during wakefulness and REM sleep in young healthy adults

EEG recordings confirm hemispheric lateralization of brain activity during cognitive tasks. The aim of the present study was to investigate spontaneous EEG lateralization under two conditions, waking and REM sleep. Bilateral monopolar EEG was recorded in eight participants using a 12-electrode montage, before the night (5 min eyes closed) and during REM sleep. Spectral analysis (0.75-19.75 Hz) revealed left prefrontal lateralization on total spectrum amplitude power and right occipital lateralization in Delta activity during waking. In contrast, during REM sleep, right frontal lateralization in Theta and Beta activities and right lateralization in occipital Delta activity was observed. These results suggest that spontaneous EEG activities generated during waking and REM sleep are supported in part by a common thalamo-cortical neural network (right occipital Delta dominance) while additional, possibly neuro-cognitive factors modulate waking left prefrontal dominance and REM sleep right frontal dominance.     

Directed Forgetting of Related Words: Evidence for the Inefficient Inhibition Hypothesis

Fifth-grade children and college students were asked to remember some words and to forget others in an item-cued-directed-forgetting task. Taxonomically related pairs of words and control pairs that were unrelated in meaning were used as stimuli. Children found it more difficult than did adults to ignore forget-cued words that followed asso-ciatively related words that were remember-cued. The results provide support for D. F. Bjorklund and K. K. Harnishfeger's (1990) inefficient inhibition hypothesis (i.e., that the efficiency of inhibitory mechanisms improves as children develop). The results also suggest that the inhibition is occurring primarily in the early stages of processing.     

Item-Cued Directed Forgetting of Related Words and Pictures in Children and Adults: Selective Rehearsal Versus Cognitive Inhibition

The main purpose of this study was to compare the relative importance of selective rehearsal and cognitive inhibition in accounting for developmental changes in the directed-forgetting paradigm developed by R. A. Bjork (1972). In two experiments, children in Grades 2 and 5 and college students were asked to remember some words or pictures and to forget others when items were categorically related. Their memory for both items and the associated remember or forget cues was then tested with recall and recognition. Fifth graders recognized more of the forget-cued words than college students did. The pattern of results suggested that age differences in rehearsal and source monitoring (i.e., remembering whether a word had been cued remember or forget) were better explanatory mechanisms for children's forgetting inefficiencies than retrieval inhibition was. The results are discussed in terms of a multiple process view of inhibition.