Psychological studies of children who have cancer

Increasingly, more optimistic prognoses for children who have cancer have led investigators to study the adjustment reactions of children who survive this traumatic experience. There is considerable evidence that the experience of having cancer, receiving prolonged and often painful treatment, and the uncertain condition of cancer survivorship have profound emotional effects on children. The characteristic features of the psychological impact of cancer are the experience of continuing uncertainty in a life-threatening crisis and the resultant search for meaning. Studies are beginning to find that even very young children actively struggle to organize and make sence of this experience.     

A developmental sequence in preschool children's acquisition of reading readiness skills and print awareness concepts

While various attempts have been made to explain the relationships among preschool children's acquisition of various aspects of print-related knowledge, studies have generally employed statistical procedures appropriate for linear relationships. Yet the relationships among measures of print-related knowledge may not be linear. One technique that has not been employed in this area but which provides a means for identifying nonlinear hierarchical relationships among measures is order analysis. The purpose of this paper was to examine empirically the acquisition of preschool children's print-related knowledge through order analysis. A data set that consisted of 60 preschool children's performances on five measures which assessed concepts about the purposes and processes of reading and the reading readiness skills of letter naming and visual and auditory discrimination was reanalyzed using ordering procedure. A multivariate analysis indicated a multidimensional relationship among the three reading readiness and two print awareness measures that differed across the three age groups. The hierarchical orderings of the five measures indicated that mastery of the reading readiness skills occurred prior to the mastery of the print awareness concepts.     

Token test performance by dyslexic adolescents

An abbreviated form of the Token Test was administered to 42 normal readers and 42 dyslexic adolescent males. The greatest divergence between the two groups was seen on Part V where syntactic complexity varies. An error analysis also supported the hypothesis that some, but not all, dyslexics have an impaired ability to process syntactic information. The Token Test, particularly Part V, would be a useful aid in the evaluation of dyslexic individuals.     

Concerning Hunt's new ways of assessing intelligence

Hunt envisions the automation of intelligence testing (Intelligence, 1982, 6, 231–240), but he appears to be overly optimistic. He neglects to mention conceptual and practical difficulties at the interface of measurement and theory that place psychometry not in the dawn of microcomputerization, but rather more nearly in its primordium.     

A comparison of error based and time based learning measures as predictors of general intelligence

Two methodological issues involved in determining the relationship between learning and general intelligence (g) are examined. They are firstly, the use of subject learning strategies in a paired-associated learning task and secondly the importance of time in the measurement of learning efficiency. Concerning the first issue, paired-associates learning scores of subjects who were instructed in the use of an appropriate learning strategy correlated significantly with general intelligence scores while those not so instructed did not. Concerning the second issue, a time based learning measure was developed to predice the time required for complete learning in the paired-associates learning task. This measure was compared learning with a number of error-based learning measures in their ability to predict general intelligence. The time based learning measure was clearly superior to the error based measures yielding a correlation of .59 with general intelligence.     

Convergence between attention variables and factors of psychometric intelligence in older adults

The purpose of the present study was to examine the hypothesis that individual differences on measures of attention would converge with select factors of psychometric intelligence, especially fluid intelligence and short-term acquisition and retrieval. A sample of 83 elderly adults $\text{(}\text{X}\text{= 71}\text{years}\text{)}$ was administered a battery of 17 psychometric ability tests. Tests were selected to mark four psychometric ability factors (Cattell and Horn's dimensions of fluid and crystallized intelligence, short-term acquisition and retrieval, and perceptual speed). Also, seven tasks representing four aspects of attention—decoding processes, selective attention, attention switching, and concentration—were administered. A confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to examine the relationships among the four psychometric ability factors and 11 variables obtained from the attention tasks. Results were only partially consistent with the hypothesized pattern of convergence. Two attention measures had significant loadings on a fluid-type intelligence factor, and one had a marginally significant loading on a short-term memory factor. In general, the greatest convergence occured between attention variables and the ability factor of Perceptual Speed. Results were discussed with respect to previous research on psychometric abilities and cognitive processes, the theory of fluid-crystallized intelligence, and their implications for understanding intellectual aging.     

The effect of instructions to organize for good and poor learners

Two studies are reported which investigate the possibility that instructing individuals to organize their recall will differentially facilitate the performance of “fast” and “slow” learners (defined in terms of performance on a pretest). Experiment I utilized alphabetic organization in the free-recall learning of a list of unrelated words; Experiment II used a categorized word list under similar conditions. In each study, half of the individuals in each ability group received instructions, prior to the first of six learning trials, that contained information about the respective nature of organization present in the list and encouragement to use this type of organization in learning the list. In Experiment I, instructions to use alphabetic organization facilitated the performance of both ability groups to about the same extent. In Experiment II, instructions to use categorical organization in learning resulted in a substantial facilitation of performance for “slow” learners and a slight decrement in performance for “fast” learners. The results from the two studies are discussed in terms of sources of individual differences in learning.     

Assortative marriage and the familiality of cognitive abilities in families of extremely gifted students

The top 1% of the extremely bright students identified by the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (Benbow & Stanley, 1980b) were tested along with their parents, using a battery of specifically designed cognitive tests. These students represented the top 0.03% of their age group in intellectual ability. The results showed that the parents were extremely able and resembled one another significantly more than parents in the general population. In addition, the intellectually precocious children resembled their parents to a lesser extent than children of average ability resemble their parents. These results suggest that considerable assortative mating has occurred among the parents of these extremely gifted youth, but that extreme giftedness cannot be predicted reliably solely as a result of the mating of bright parents.     

Individual differences in intelligence: A reappraisal of the confluence model

The confluence model posits that an individual's intellectual development is a function of the intellectual environment he or she is exposed to in the home. Families with many children spaced close together are presumed to have intellectual environments inferior to those of families with few children spaced far apart. To date, the major support for the confluence model has come from analyses of the family size-birth order means of large aggregate data sets. Analyses of the individual scores of some of those same aggregate data sets, however, do not substantiate the confluence model. Explained variance for the aggregate (90%+) reduce to less than 3% in the individual analyses. A recommendation is made to shift the focus of the confluence model from family configuration variables to family interaction varibles utilizing longitudinal data from individuals.