The meaning of before and after for preschool children

Preschool children's understanding of temporal relationships was examined in terms of their comprehension of sentences containing clauses linked by before and after. The relative importance of order of mention and main-subordinate relations strategies in children's interpretation of temporal order information was also evaluated.Divergent error patterns emerged on the tasks; omissions prevailed on the two tasks involving response to commands, reversals prevailed on the other. Further examination revealed that omissions reflected ambiguity in the linguistic structure of commands. Thus the effect of main-subordinate relations was confounded with directness of command. On all comprehension tasks, however, performance was superior on sentence forms in which order of mention and order of occurrence correspond.     

Developmental changes in predicting one's own span of short-term memory

Developmental changes in the accuracy of predicting one's own recall were studied, using preschool, third grade, and college subjects in Experiment 1 and third grade and college subjects in Experiment 2. Experiment 1 showed that prediction accuracy increased from the preschool to the college years, subjects were not influenced by a potential “expectancy” bias in the procedure, and only third grade subjects were influenced by the presence of norms about peer performance. Experiment 2 showed that third graders and college subjects lower their predictions in the face of “false” norm information, with college subjects being the only group to under predict actual recall in both experiments. Thus, although adults are significantly more accurate than elementary shool children in estimating short-term recall, their susceptibility to norm information suggests that even they have uncertainty about their exact capabilities.     

The effect of children's spontaneous cognitive sets on discrimination learning

Two experiments investigated the role of children's spontaneous cognitive “sets” in pictorial discrimination learning. Lists were constructed to highlight either perceptual or conceptual similarities among the stimuli. In each experiment age by treatment interactions revealed that in comparison to the behavior of older children (sixth graders), that of younger children (kindergartners) is governed more by the perceptible than by the conceptual attributes of stimuli—data in complete accord with Bruner's view of cognitive development.     

Children judge "perspective" transformations of letterlike forms as different from prototypes

Children from 5 to 11 years old made same-different judgments of prototypes of letterlike forms paired with transforms of these prototypes generated on a dimension either critical or noncritical for object identification. For compression transformations (noncritical: as in perspective shift), frequency of correct “different” judgments increased as the degree of compression in the transform increased. This result challenges the view that dimensions irrelevant in object identification are ignored or not detected in graphic discrimination.     

The effects of perceptual pretraining on concept identification and preference

The effects of perceptual pretraining on preferences and concept identification performance in five- and eight-year-old Ss were investigated. The results indicated that perceptual pretraining facilitated performance on a concept identification task with a non-preferred relevant cue for the five-year-olds, but not for the eight-year-olds. However, perceptual pretraining did not affect preference in either age group and Ss were as consistent in their preference responding before and after perceptual pretraining as was a control group that had not received perceptual pretraining. Preferences were highly consistent in both age groups over a one week period. Perceptual pretraining was interpreted to increase the usability of the less preferred dimensions for the younger Ss, and to leave the affective preference response unaltered in both groups.     

A note on the use of A′ as a measure of sensitivity

The use of A′, a nonparametric measure of sensitivity in tests of recognition memory, is discussed. In particular, two formulas for computing A′ are considered. One formula, which was reported in a recent paper by Berch (1975), should be used only when the observed hit rate is greater than or equal to the false alarm rate. A second formula is presented for computing A′ when the hit rate is less than the false alarm rate.     

Factor structure of the WISC-R with Anglos and Mexican-Americans

The present study compared the underlying factor structure of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised for Anglo and Mexican-American children. Subtests of the WISC-R were administered to 109 Anglo and 123 Mexican-American children ranging from 8 to 15 years of age and were analyzed separately for each group. Three factors emerged for each ethnic classification which corresponded closely to those usually reported for the WISC-R. Coefficients of congruence (.84–.89) between factors given the same name for each ethnic group indicated a high degree of similarity in constructs being measured.     

A comparison of preservice and experienced teachers' perceptions of the school psychologist

The present study compared experienced and preservice elementary school teachers' perceptions of the school psychologist. Thirty-two experienced teachers were matched with a like number of second semester juniors in training. A questionnaire asked each respondent to (a) rank a number of school personnel on their importance, (b) assign a number of referral problems to professionals best equipped to handle them, and (c) to rate the school psychologist's functioning on 11 dimensions. The analysis showed that experienced and preservice teachers agreed about the importance of the school psychologist and the appropriateness of referral problems. Analysis of ratings revealed that experienced teachers had a more negative opinion of the school psychologist's functioning when compared to their novice counterparts.