Normative data on the Missouri Children's Picture Series and the Missouri Children's Behavior Checklist with southern black children

Normative data are presented for Southern black children on two objective personality inventories for children: the Missouri Children's Picture Series (MCPS), a child picture-sorting task, and the Missouri Children's Behavior Checklist (MBCL), a parent rating scale. The MCPS was administered to 615 black children attending public schools in a low socioeconomic area of the southeast United States. Parents returned the MBCL on 437 of the children. Means and standard deviations on eight MCPS personality scales and six MCBL behavior rating scales are presented for black males and females at ages 5 through 16, and effects of age, sex, and various scale intercorrelations are discussed. Results suggest systematic age and sex differences on the various scales for black children that are quite atypical when compared with the MCPS in other samples. Various empirical questions regarding the validity of these instruments when used with Southern black children are raised.     

The effect of set size on hemifield asymmetries in letter recognition

Single letters were presented tachistoscopically in the left or right hemifield to right-handed observers. Superior recognition of letters on the right was found for letters chosen from subsets containing four items, but no differences were found when any letter, or any symmetrical letter, could appear. In a second experiment, the right hemifield advantage was found under conditions requiring the subject to determine the subset only when the subset chosen was appropriate. Results were discussed in terms of the adequacy of language-based explanations of hemifield asymmetries in letter recognition.     

THE DEVELOPMENT OF KNOWLEDGE CONCERNING WRITTEN ARITHMETIC: A CROSS-CULTURAL STUDY

This study is concerned with the manner in which Western mathematics is assimilated by children raised in traditional African cultures. It was predicted that after an initial period of difficulty in learning school arithmetic, African children (Baoulé and Dioula from the Ivory Coast) acquire basic concepts, develop invented strategies, and make errors similar to those of American children. Further, it was predicted that Dioula children, since they are members of a commercial culture, perform at a somewhat higher level than the Baoulé, members of a farming culture which does not seem to stress computational activity. To investigate these hypotheses, American, Baoulé, and Dioula children at two age levels were given a variety of arithmetic problems involving basic skills (e.g., reading numbers), number knowledge (e.g., place value), and calculational abilities (e.g., written computation). The results showed that, in general, older African and American children (fifth- and sixth-graders) were quite similar in all respects. The only large and significant differences occurred in the case of younger children (second- and third-graders). At this level American children generally performed at a higher level than Africans, as predicted, and Dioula occasionally at a higher level than Baoulé, also as predicted. At the same time, qualitative aspects of African and American children's performance were similar: for example, both groups made the same types and proportions of errors in written calculations. The results generally support the hypotheses and can be explained in terms of both educational and cognitive factors.     

Performance of dyslexic children on speech perception tests

Several researchers who have compared the performance of dyslexic and normal-reading children on a variety of different tasks have suggested that dyslexic children may have subtle deficits in the phonemic analysis of spoken as well as written language. Thus it is of interest to know how children who have extraordinary difficulty learning to read can perform explicity auditory-phonetic tasks. Seventeen dyslexic children (10 years of age) and a group of 17 controls were administered tests of identification and discrimination of synthesized voiced stop consonants differing in place of articulation. These were tests of the type used to study categorical perception in adults, adapted for use with young children. Significant differences between dyslexics and controls were found in both kinds of tasks; the pattern of identification and discrimination differences suggests an inconsistency in the dyslexics' phonetic classification of auditory cues. A significant relationship was found between reading level and speech discrimination.     

Medication effects in the classroom: Three naturalistic indicators

Hyperactive and comparison boys participated in 5-week summer enrichment programs that included classroom activities and structured assessments of peer interaction patterns. During the 3rd and 4th weeks of these programs, a double-blind, methylphenidate-placebo crossover design was implemented within the hyperactive group. Three heterogeneous indicators of everyday behaviors were obtained: number of negative incidents noted by staff, quality of handwriting, and number of times the teacher called the boys' names aloud in the classroom. Medication effects emerged for each of these indicators. When hyperactive boys were taking placebos, they were involved in more negative incidents, their handwriting was poorer, and their names were called more frequently than when the boys were taking methylphenidate. Interrelationships among the measures suggest moderate cross-situational generality of medication responsiveness. Discussion focused on the bandwidth of medication effects and the need to examine the social ramifications of child treatments.This research was supported in part by NIMH grant 29475 and NIDA grant 01070. We gratefully acknowledge the participation of the data coders and the many summer school staff. Special thanks go to Mike Berlin, Barry E. Collins, and Sharon Dotemoto. Methylphenidate and placebo were supplied by Ciba-Geigy, Summit, New Jersey.     

The effects of stem length and directions on sentence completion test responses

In an investigation of the effects of stem structure and direction set on sentence completion responses, 160 undergraduate males were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: Rotter ISB with "feelings" instructions, Rotter ISB with "speed" instructions, Sacks SCT with "feelings" instructions, Sacks SCT with "speed" instructions. Eight clinical judges derived hypotheses from the completed protocols; two judges evaluated each protocol. Interjudge reliability was measured by Pearson product-moment correlations and percents of agreement. There was a significant effect for amount of stem structure; the structured Sacks SCT stems yielded more clinical hypotheses. Structured stems also elicited significantly more feeling words. No significant effect was found for instructional set, nor was there a significant relationship between stem structure or instruction set and the numbers of words in completions.     

Orthogonal dimensions of individual and group forms of the Rorschach

Most dimensional analyses of traditional Rorschach scoring categories have either failed to control for differences in total R or have done so by introducing a nonstandard mode of administration. Consequently, the results of such studies may be either distorted or of questionable relevance to more typical situations. The present analyses, which compared both group and individual forms of the Rorschach administered to large samples (over 500 each) of male medical students, controlled for differences in total R by using residualized scores from which the linear effects of R had been partialled. The factor-analytic results are expressed in terms of seven easily interpretable factors (including total R), five of which are similar across forms, and simple formulas for deriving norm-referenced factor scores from the data of individual test administrations are provided.