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In adaptive learning systems, various models are employed to obtain the optimal learning schedule and review for a specific learner. Models of learning are used to estimate the learner's current recall probability by incorporating features or predictors proposed by psychological theory or empirically relevant to learners' performance. Logistic regression for knowledge tracing has been used widely in modern learner performance modeling. Notably, the learning history included in such models is typically confined to learners' prior accuracy performance without paying attention to learners' response time (RT), such as the performance factors analysis (PFA) model. However, RT and accuracy may give us a more comprehensive picture of a learner's learning trajectory. For example, without considering RT, we cannot estimate whether the learner's performance has reached the automatic or fluent level since these criteria are not accuracy based. Therefore, in the current research, we propose and test new RT-related features to capture learners' correct RT fluctuations around their estimated ideal fluent RT. Our results indicate that the predictiveness of the standard PFA model can be increased by up to 10% for our test data after incorporating RT-related features, but the complexity of the question format constrains the improvement during practice. If the question is of low complexity and the observed accuracy of the learner can be influenced by guessing, which results in the imprecision measured by accuracy, then the RT-related features provide additional predictive power. In other words, RT-related features are informative when accuracy alone does not completely reflect learners' learning processes. [For the complete proceedings, see ED630829.]

The Indian Institute of Science is proud to host the fully in-person sixteenth iteration of the International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM) during July 11-14, 2023. EDM is the annual flagship conference of the International Educational Data Mining Society. The theme of this year's conference is "Educational data mining for amplifying human potential." Not all students or seekers of knowledge receive the education necessary to help them realize their full potential, be it due to a lack of resources or lack of access to high quality teaching. The dearth in high-quality educational content, teaching aids, and methodologies, and non-availability of objective feedback on how they could become better teachers, deprive our teachers from achieving their full potential. The administrators and policy makers lack tools for making optimal decisions such as optimal class sizes, class composition, and course sequencing. All these handicap the nations, particularly the economically emergent ones, who recognize the centrality of education for their growth. EDM-2023 has striven to focus on concepts, principles, and techniques mined from educational data for amplifying the potential of all the stakeholders in the education system. The spotlights of EDM-2023 include: (1) Five keynote talks by outstanding researchers of eminence; (2) A plenary Test of Time award talk and a Banquet talk; (3) Five tutorials (foundational as well as advanced); (4) Four thought provoking panels on contemporary themes; (5) Peer reviewed technical paper and poster presentations; (6) Doctoral students consortium; and (7) An enchanting cultural programme. [Individual papers are indexed in ERIC.]

A modified, bilingual Attitudes Toward Mathematics Inventory (ATMI) instrument was administered to 1,258 high school students in South Texas in an NSF-funded project on informal learning of mathematics and near peer mentoring. We explore students' survey response behaviors and examine the existence of careless and insufficient effort (CIE) responses. This is empirical research for handling the challenge of CIE responses that leads to improved survey data quality, thus eventually validating the intervention effect of the mathematical informal learning project. [For the complete proceedings, see ED658295.]

When examinees perceive a test as low stakes, it is logical to assume that some of them will not put out their maximum effort. This condition makes the validity of the test results more complicated. Although many studies have investigated motivational fluctuation across tests during a testing session, only a small number of studies have investigated motivational fluctuation across items within a single test. This study aims to examine the pattern of test-taking effort across items in cognitive ability tests when items are presented in a random order manner. Response Time Effort (RTE) was used as a measure of test-taking effort. This measure calculates the proportion of rapid responses in the test based on the response times for each item. Data from 213 university students completing the inductive reasoning test was examined using latent class analysis. The results suggested that examinees in low-stakes testing have different patterns of effort across items. Examinees who consistently provided a high level of effort across items had higher test performance, test-taking engagement, and RTE. Item position and item difficulty are also correlated negatively with test-taking effort. Implications of these results for researchers and practitioners are discussed.

The quality of exams drives test-taking behavior of examinees and is a proxy for the quality of teaching. As most university exams have strict time limits, and speededness is an important measure of the cognitive state of examinees, this might be used to assess the connection between exams' quality and examinees' performance. The practice of randomization within university exams enables the analysis of item position effects within individual exams as a measure of speededness, and as such it enables the creation of a measure of the quality of an exam. In this research, we use generalized linear mixed models to evaluate item position effects on response accuracy and response time in a large dataset of randomized exams from Utrecht University. We find that there is an effect of item position on response time for most exams, but the same is not true for response accuracy, which might be a starting point for identifying factors that influence speededness and can affect the mental state of examinees. [For the full proceedings, see ED615472.]

As evidence grows supporting the importance of non-cognitive factors in learning, computer-assisted learning platforms increasingly incorporate non-academic interventions to influence student learning and learning related-behaviors. Non-cognitive interventions often attempt to influence students' mindset, motivation, or metacognitive reflection to impact learning behaviors and outcomes. In the current paper, we analyze data from five experiments, involving seven treatment conditions embedded in mastery-based learning activities hosted on a computer-assisted learning platform focused on middle school mathematics. Each treatment condition embodied a specific non-cognitive theoretical perspective. Over seven school years, 20,472 students participated in the experiments. We estimated the effects of each treatment condition on students' response time, hint usage, likelihood of mastering knowledge components, learning efficiency, and post-tests performance. Our analyses reveal a mix of both positive and negative treatment effects on student learning behaviors and performance. Few interventions impacted learning as assessed by the post-tests. These findings highlight the difficulty in positively influencing student learning behaviors and outcomes using non-cognitive interventions. [This paper was published in: "LAK23: 13th International Learning Analytics and Knowledge Conference Proceedings," March 13-17, 2023.]

The "2nd Annual WPI-UMASS-UPENN EDM Data Mining Challenge" required contestants to predict efficient testtaking based on log data. In this paper, we describe our theory-driven and psychometric modeling approach. For feature engineering, we employed the Log-Normal Response Time Model for estimating latent person speed, and the Generalized Partial Credit Model for estimating latent person ability. Additionally, we adopted an n-gram feature approach for event sequences. For training a multi-label classifier, we distinguished inefficient test takers who were going too fast and those who were going too slow, instead of using the provided binary target label. Our best-performing ensemble classifier comprised three sets of low-dimensional classifiers, dominated by test-taker speed. While our classifier reached moderate performance, relative to competition leaderboard, our approach makes two important contributions. First, we show how explainable classifiers could provide meaningful predictions if results can be contextualized to test administrators who wish to intervene or take action. Second, our re-engineering of test scores enabled us to incorporate person ability into the estimation. However, ability was hardly predictive of efficient behavior, leading to the conclusion that the target label's validity needs to be questioned. The paper concludes with tools that are helpful for substantively meaningful log data mining. [For the full proceedings, see ED607784.]

Response time has been used as an important predictor of student performance in various models. Much of this work is based on the hypothesis that if students respond to a problem step too quickly or too slowly, they are most likely to be unsuccessful in that step. However, something that is less explored is that students may cycle through different states within a single response time and the time spent in those states may have separate effects on students' performance. The core hypothesis of this work is that identifying the different states and estimating how much time is devoted to them in a single response time period will help us predict student performance more accurately. In this work, we decompose response time into meaningful subcategories that can be indicative of helpful or harmful cognitive states. We then show how a model that is using these subcategories as predictors instead of response time as a whole outperforms both a linear and a non-linear baseline model. [For the full proceedings, see ED607784.]

The 13th iteration of the International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2020) was originally arranged to take place in Ifrane, Morocco. Due to the SARS-CoV-2 (coronavirus) epidemic, EDM 2020, as well as most other academic conferences in 2020, had to be changed to a purely online format. To facilitate efficient transmission of presentations all paper presenters pre-recorded their presentation as a video and then hosted it on YouTube with closed-captioning (CC). The official theme of this year's conference is Improving Learning Outcomes for All Learners. The theme comprises two parts: (1) Identifying actionable learning or teaching strategies that can be used to "improve" learning outcomes, not just predict them; (2) Using EDM to promote more "equitable" learning across diverse groups of learners, and to benefit underserved communities in particular. This year's conference features three invited talks: Alina von Davier, Chief Officer at ACTNext; Abelardo Pardo, Professor and Dean of Programs (Engineering), at UniSA STEM, University of South Australia; and Kobi Gal, Associate Professor at the Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and Reader at the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh.

When too much visual stimuli is present, the phenomenon of clutter is known to degrade an individual's perception across a variety of domains, ranging from completing search tasks incorrectly, to decreasing reading speed when letters are too close together. However, research is lacking as to whether the negative effects of clutter impact learning when too many words are visible at any one given time. Furthermore, colour has been implicated in affecting clutter. Thus, the present study created a recognition experiment whereby 42 participants had to learn target words that were presented in black or red font and positioned amongst no clutter, clutter words (distractor words surrounded the target), and clutter non-words (sequence of random letters surrounded the target). Results found that words learned in isolation were identified faster and significantly more accurately than words learned in both forms of clutter. Although red target words did not eliminate the negative effects of clutter, red words did show a trend towards higher accuracy of recognition compared to black words. These results would appear to be explained by existing clutter theories that state the limits of attentional resources and short-term memory cannot process excess visual stimuli. These findings have real-world implications for establishing optimal reading formats to improve learning.

The 12th iteration of the International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2019) is organized under the auspices of the International Educational Data Mining Society in Montreal, Canada. The theme of this year's conference is EDM in Open-Ended Domains. As EDM has matured it has increasingly been applied to open-ended and ill-defined tasks such as writing, design, and collaborative problem solving, and it has been used in new informal contexts where student actions are at best semi-structured. This iteration of the conference includes a range of work in these and other areas. This year's conference features three invited talks: Julita Vassileva, Professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Saskatchewan, Canada; Steve Ritter, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist, Carnegie Learning Inc., Pittsburgh; and Michael Mozer, Professor Department of Computer Science and Institute of Cognitive Science University of Colorado. The number of accepted papers include 22 full papers and 42 short papers. An additional 47 papers were accepted to the poster track. The poster and demo track itself accepted 14 contributions out of 34 submissions. Together with the "Journal of Educational Data Mining" ("JEDM"), the EDM 2019 conference held a "JEDM" Track that provides researchers a venue to deliver more substantial mature work than is possible in a conference proceeding and to present their work to a live audience. The papers submitted to this track followed the "JEDM" peer review process. Two such papers are featured in the conference's program. Additionally this year, papers that were regularly published in the journal in 2018 were invited for presentation at the conference. Two authors accepted this invitation. The main conference invited contributions to an Industry Track in addition to the main track. The EDM 2019 Industry Track received eleven submissions of which six were accepted. The EDM conference continues its tradition of providing opportunities for young researchers to present their work and receive feedback from their peers and senior researchers. The doctoral consortium this year features eight such presentations. This year's conference includes also an invited talk by the authors of the 2018 winner of the EDM Test of Time Award. This year's talk is delivered by Mykola Pechenizkiy. In addition to the main program, there are three workshops: (1) Learning Analytics: Building bridges between the Education and the Computing communities; (2) Reinforcement Learning for Educational Data Mining; and (3) Workshop on EDM & Games: Leveling Up Engaged Learning with Data-Rich Analytics. Three tutorials were presented as well: (1) Sharing and Reusing Data and Analytic Methods with LearnSphere; (2) Causal Discovery with Tetrad in LearnSphere's Tigris and Designing and Developing Open; and (3) Pedagogically-Based Predictive Models using the Moodle Analytics API.

The article is devoted to the issue of learning from the cognitive perspective. As life-long learning is an integral part of our modern life, the authors were attracted by the phenomenon when even young people demonstrate cognitive "resistance" to learning. This particular study is focused on cognitive destructions as challenges to learning and is based on the idea of non-linear nature of a cognitive style. Eighty subjects participated in the study with different types of psychological tests employed, including Stroop test, embedded figure test, tolerance of ambiguity, assumptive worlds, personality characteristics in decision making. The main findings are the following: cognitive degradations, which are based on different types of rigidity, which impedes not only the process of learning but also social behaviour of a person as well; the second finding is the intensity of tolerance of ambiguity in a subgroup with extreme analytical thinking is a destructive cognitive phenomenon, one of the manifestations of a negative mental attitude - the closure to the experience. The results prove that the subjects with extreme types of cognitive styles tend to demonstrate a "close" type of mind. This raises the discussion of different understanding of the rigidity phenomenon and gives fruit for thought and prospects of further research into the field of the role of cognitive resources in learning. [For the complete proceedings, see ED600498.]

This research aims to explore the transfer learning of cognitive control skills using mobile applications. We explored whether mobile application can serve as a viable platform in training interference control, specifically the color Stroop task. Mobile phone's advantage lies in its portability and its ability to reach many people. Forty undergraduates from the authors' university were involved in the experiment. We introduced the use of a mobile application to present training exercises as well as to record answers and reaction times. Half of the participants were given standard logical thinking questions whereas the other half was given different types of Stroop task as a form of training, followed by the color Stroop test as a test of transference. The results showed that mobile app training using different types of Stroop task significantly improved the performance on the color Stroop Task in reaction time. Future studies can explore transfer learning of other types of cognitive control as well as explore our findings for other age groups. [For the complete proceedings, see ED600498.]

Educational systems typically contain a large pool of items (questions, problems). Using data mining techniques we can group these items into knowledge components, detect duplicated items and outliers, and identify missing items. To these ends, it is useful to analyze item similarities, which can be used as input to clustering or visualization techniques. We describe and evaluate different measures of item similarity that are based only on learners' performance data, which makes them widely applicable. We provide evaluation using both simulated data and real data from several educational systems. The results show that Pearson correlation is a suitable similarity measure and that response times are useful for improving stability of similarity measures when the scope of available data is small. [For the full proceedings, see ED596512.]

Question and answer forums are becoming more popular as increasing numbers of lifelong learners rely on such forums to receive help about their learning needs. Stack Overflow (SO) is an example of such a forum used by millions of programmers. The ability of users to receive timely answers to questions is crucial to the sustainability of such forums and for successful lifelong learning. In SO we have observed that the number of questions answered within 15 minutes have diminished with more questions taking a longer time to get answered or remaining unanswered in some cases. This suggests the need for an effective approach in predicting prospective helpers who can provide timely answers to the questions. In this paper, we seek to explore strategies to match helpers and help seekers. In particular we wish to use these strategies to predict which SO users will provide timely answers to questions asked in SO, and then compare these predictions to the users who actually answered the questions. In making these predictions we looked at 3 time frames of user data: 1 month, 3 months and 6 months. We used 5 basic strategies: frequency, knowledgeability, eagerness, willingness, recency; and we compared the success rates of each strategy in making predictions on 3 different success criteria: predicting the first answerer, predicting the answerer most liked by the asker of the question, and predicting the answerer rated most highly by other SO users. We then incorporated a timeliness measure, which takes into consideration how quickly the user provides answers to questions in the past, which helped us to achieve a higher success rate. The results of our study are an improvement over a similar previous study of SO and we hope will form the basis of methods for recommending peers in online forums who can provide just-intime help to lifelong learners as their knowledge needs evolve and change. [For the full proceedings, see ED596512.]

We developed a version of AutoTutor that helps struggling adult learners improve their comprehension strategies through conversational agents. We hypothesized that the accuracy and time to answer questions during the conversation could be diagnostic of their mastery of different reading comprehension components: words, textbase, situation model, and rhetorical structure. The results show that adults' performance on more basic reading components (i.e., meaning of words) was higher than on the deeper discourse levels. In contrast, time did not vary significantly among the theoretical levels. The results suggested that adults with low literacy had higher mastery on basic reading levels than deeper discourse levels. The tracking of performance on the four theoretical levels can provide a more nuanced diagnosis of reading problems than a single overall performance score and ultimately improve the adaptivity of an ITS like AutoTutor. [This paper was published in: R. Nkambou, R. Azevedo & J. Vassileva (Eds.), "Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems" (pp 463-465). Montreal, Cananda: Springer.]

Time has become a standard feature used in EDM models, and is used in models of meta-cognitive strategies to models of disengagement. Most of these models consider whether a student action is "too fast" or "too slow". However, an open question remains on how we define and select these cut-offs. Moreover, it is not clear that the same cut-offs are appropriate across different situations. Some students may generally respond faster than others; more difficult items may take different amounts of time. In this paper, we consider whether absolute or relative indicators of time are more appropriate as cut-offs, and whether simple transformations (such as log time) are useful when representing time. We do so through visualizing student performance in relation to general student ability, item difficulty, and different ways of representing time. We find that student knowledge and item difficulty should be taken into account when choosing cut-offs, and that there are advantages to representing duration in terms of standardized log-time. [For the full proceedings, see ED592609.]

This mixed-method, qualitative/quantitative study examined (a) how a constructivist-based intervention (CBI) effected adults' learning of unit fractions and performance on whole-number (WN) or unit fraction (FR) comparisons and (b) brain circuitry implicated (fMRI) when processing these comparisons. The CBI used unit-iteration based activities to foster a shift in participants' understanding of FR, from the prevalent, limiting "one-out-of-so-many-equal-parts" idea to a multiplicative relation conception and thus inverse magnitude relation among FR (1/n>1/m though m>n). Pre- and two post-intervention tests indicated CBI impact on decreased reaction time in comparing not just FR but also WN and differentiated brain regions implicated for each. Implications for theory testing and CBI impact on WN-FR links are discussed. [For the complete proceedings, see ED597799.]

Poor mathematics achievement in middle school students is evident in many countries. While some of the difficulties can be attributed to student related factors, there is considerable evidence that computational automaticity is essential for mathematics achievement. A QuickSmart (QS) mathematics intervention program was trialled with a group of students in Grades 7 and 8, matched with a control group of similar underachieving classmates. A statistically significant decrease in mean response latencies was found for QS participants after lessons in multiplication only. Significant differences were also evident between the pre and post scores of the two groups on a standardised test of mathematics. This study confirms and extends previous findings of the efficacy of mathematics intervention for underperforming middle school students. [For the complete proceedings, see ED597799.]

This paper provides a discussion of the results of a cross-sectional examination of linguistic variables that are predicted to influence L2 reading fluency. This study is part of a larger, longitudinal mixed-methods study into reading fluency development using online Timed Reading (TR) with participants from a mid-to-high level private university in western Japan. The larger study will also be briefly explained to provide some background. For the study presented in this paper, participants read two, short, equivalent, graded, online texts against a clock and then answered comprehension questions without recourse to the texts. A custom-made web application was used to administer the readings. The texts used were all 300-words long and graded using tools available on "The Compleat Lexical Tutor" website (Cobb, 2003) to be within the first 1,000 words of English. Data from a battery of tests that included a paper-based vocabulary size test (Nation & Beglar, 2007), and a computer-based word-recognition reaction time test were recorded. These data were triangulated with graded text reading performance data to assess the relative importance of the components assessed. The relationship between the measured variables is explained using correlation and regression analysis, providing insight for reading researchers and teachers. [For full proceedings, see ED565044.]

Adaptive learning techniques have typically scheduled practice using learners' accuracy and item presentation history. We describe an adaptive learning system (Adaptive Response Time Based Sequencing--ARTS) that uses both accuracy and response time (RT) as direct inputs into sequencing. Response times are used to assess learning strength and to determine mastery, making both fluency and accuracy goals of learning. ARTS optimizes spacing by expanding item recurrence intervals as an inverse function of RT. In Experiment 1, we compared ARTS to Atkinson's (1972) Markov model system using geography learning and found substantially greater learning efficiency for ARTS. In Experiment 2, we deployed the system in a real learning setting. Third graders attending an online school mastered basic multiplication facts in about two hours using ARTS, outperforming a control group using standard instruction. These results suggest that response time-based adaptive learning has remarkable potential to enhance learning in many domains. [This paper was published in: L. Carlson, C. Hoelscher, & T. Shipley (Eds.), "Expanding the Space of Cognitive Science: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society" (pp. 2532-2537). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.]

In this work we introduce the system for adaptive practice of foundations of mathematics. Adaptivity of the system is primarily provided by selection of suitable tasks, which uses information from a domain model and a student model. The domain model does not use prerequisites but works with splitting skills to more concrete sub-skills. The student model builds on variation of Elo rating system which provide good accuracy and easy application in online system. The main feature of the student model is use of response times which can carry useful information about mastery. [For complete proceedings, see ED560503.]

Estimation is useful in situations where an exact answer is not as important as a quick answer that is good enough. A web-based adaptive system for practicing estimates is currently being developed. We propose a simple model for estimating student's latent skill of estimation. This model combines a continuous measure of correctness and response times. The advantage of the model is its simple update method which makes it directly applicable in the developed adaptive system. [For complete proceedings, see ED560503.]

The current state of technology allows physicians to look up information in everyday practice using a wealth of medical resources. This change in practice may be important enough to consider it being reflected in medical certification exams, making the exam more similar to real practice. However, there is limited research comparing open- and closed-book exams in high-stakes medical certification assessments, and the research that has been conducted yields inconclusive and somewhat discrepant results. This study aims to address this gap in the literature using a large-scale controlled study in a secure testing center to determine the logistical and psychometric viability of an open-book format for all or some portion of a medical certification exam.

Recently, there has been a resurgence of interest in the use of response latencies in psychological assessment. Some research has suggested that response times associated with answering personality and integrity questionnaires may be useful in differentiating among honest responders and individuals who are lying. Using an experimental paradigm with 100 unemployed individuals seeking work, the ability of personnel test item response latencies to distinguish between subjects instructed to lie and those instructed to respond honestly was examined. Based on a general model of lying derived from schema theory, it was predicted that applicants who were lying on a personnel test would take relatively longer to admit to negative or delinquent behaviors than job candidates who were responding honestly. The results demonstrated support for the general model of lying, and discriminant function analysis indicated that response latencies to items on standard personnel tests could significantly differentiate between those who were lying and those who were honest. Theoretical and applied implications are discussed. (Author/BF)

As part of a study to determine whether visual and manual response systems are correlated, 26 children between 40 and 51 months of age took part in visual and manual reaction time (RT) tasks. Subjects, whose RTs had previously been tested at 3 months of age, were tested in 1 of 2 conditions. In the first condition, subjects viewed pictures only while eye movements were recorded. In the second condition, subjects pressed a left or right button depending on the location in which a picture appeared, and both eye movement RTs and manual RTs were recorded. All subjects received the RT measures first and then were administered part of the Wechsler Preschool Primary Scale of Intelligence to determine verbal, performance, and full-scale IQs. Children's RTs were compared with the RTs previously measured at 3 months to establish the stability of processing speed from infancy to early childhood. The study found a moderate correlation between manual and visual RT in early childhood, and stability in RT from infancy to early childhood. Negative correlations between manual and visual RTs and IQ, reflecting faster RTs with higher IQ, were found. Subjects were consistently slower to initiate eye movements when they were required to make a choice of which button to press than when they were not, but this effect was less striking for children with high IQ than low IQ. (AC)

This study was conducted to determine the relationship between teachers' experience and their perceptions of and reactions to problematic classroom situations. The purpose was to assist teacher educators to more adequately train beginning teachers who then would be better prepared to deal with problematic classroom situations. Subjects (N=49) were secondary teachers from the Southeast of the Netherlands: 25 inexperienced teachers with 0 to 3 years experience and 24 experienced teachers with more than 5 years of practice. Five simulated problematic classroom situations were shown on videotape, and teachers were asked to complete two questionnaires dealing with emotional stress reaction and the sense of self-efficacy. The data suggest that experienced teachers' reactions are characterized by more complexity than those of inexperienced teachers; experienced teachers produce more reaction-intentions and need more reaction time; both groups show no differences in their range of reactions and seem to react in a confrontive, friendly-directive or understanding-permissive way. Attributional differences of teachers appear to be related to situational cues, rather than to teachers' experience. (LL)

Studies of the pauses between teachers' questions and students' responses have indicated that lengthening wait-time produces significant improvement in intellectual performance. Two types of pauses have been identified: the pause after teachers pose questions and students respond, and the pause that takes place when students hesitate momentarily in their replies. Typically, pauses between teacher and student remarks average approximately 1 second. Even though 3-second pauses in classroom interaction have been shown to be important, most efforts to train teachers to use wait-time effectively have met with little success. An electronic device, which provides automatic, continuous monitoring of pauses in classroom dialogue, consists of voice-activated switches, a variable timer, and a system of red and green lights. A red light is activated when a person is speaking, while a green light signals whenever sustained silence occurs. Field testing has indicated that using the device helped teachers to prolong wait-time in questioning. A diagram of a "wait time feedback" device is included with the description. (JD)

Three pairs of spatial antonyms (higher than/lower than, above/below, and rising away from/falling away from) were used in a task in which subjects judged whether a sentence accurately described a previously presented pictorial relationship. Subjects' reaction times were used as the dependent measure. Since all three word pairs were used synonymously to describe the same pictures (either a plus over a star or a star over a plus), significant differences between the pairs must reflect differences in ability to apply them to this task. Reaction-time differences indicated that, within each pair of antonyms, the member referring to "upness" was easier to comprehend and that the three pairs differed in the size of intra-pair differences, in overall comprehensibility, and in correspondence to a model of picture/sentence matching developed by Clark and Chase (1972) to describe the use of "above/below" in this task. (Author/AA)

This paper discusses three studies which examined the interaction of dimensional dominance with the attentional components of alertness and encoding. In Study I, twenty 6- and 7-year-olds observed thirty 3-second exposures of a color, then participated in a 40-trial choice reaction time task in which the familiarized color and a novel color served as warning signals. Results supported the hypothesis that the stimulus familiarization effect (familiar stimuli elicit slower responses than do novel stimuli) is a result of a decrease in the alerting value of that stimulus. In Study II, 20 first graders were familiarized to a color and then given 40 choice reaction time trials in which the familiar color and novel color served as response cues. An unrelated warning signal was also used just prior to each response cue to insure maximum alertness, regardless of the stimulus that followed. Results showed that a positive encoding effect could be observed when the alertness decrement was by-passed. In Study III, 22 kindergarteners were familiarized to a colored shape and were then given 36 straight reaction time trials with one of two shapes of one of two colors. A color-form preference test was also given to determine dimensional dominance. The results indicated that the familiarized stimulus was responded to more slowly than the completely different stimulus and that response speeds to partially different stimuli varied as a function of dimensional dominance. Findings from these studies are discussed in terms of the relationship between perception and cognition. (JMB)

Two experiments evaluated the effects of mnemonic training upon 5- and 10-year-old children's learning and retention of patterns at varying intervals. Subjects were 172 middle class children evenly distributed across the two age groups. Experiment I investigated the effects of individual strategies (perceptual exploration, organization of distinctive features, or verbal cues) and reinforcement on retention by children of both age levels after a 3-minute interval. Experiment II investigated the effects of a constant sequence of all three strategies (perceptual exploration, organization of distinctive features, and verbal cues, in that order) and reinforcement on retention after 3-minute, 1-week, and 1-month intervals. Item recognition and reaction times were recorded for all recognition tests. The results indicated that training in both individual strategies and a sequence of strategies facilitated 5- and 10-year-old children's retention of patterns at all intervals. Reinforcement at the time of training was found to be effective in the retention of patterns. Item recognition diminished with lengthening intervals, but decreases were smaller for trained groups. The 10-year-old children had shorter reaction times than did 5-year-old children. Implications for classroom learning are noted briefly. (Author/MS)

After it had been determined that reaction time (RT) was a sensitive measure of hemispheric dominance in a verbal task performed by normal adult readers, the reaction times of three groups of subjects (20 normal reading college students, 12 normal reading third graders and 11 poor reading grade school students) were compared. Ss were exposed to tachistoscopically presented slides with stimulus words across both visual fields and probe words presented to either the right or left visual fields. Both groups of normal readers exhibited superior right visual field RT while the poor readers failed to display such a superiority. Findings suggested that verbal RT may be a useful screening technique to identify potential problem readers. (Author/CL)

This paper reports two related experiments, the first investigating whether children 3-7 years old demonstrate Flavell's Level-2 perspective-taking in a cognitively simple task, and the second re-examining children's performance on a task comparable to the Piagetian 3-mountain perspective-taking task. The first experiment involved a task which eliminated the usual spatial and representational components of the classic 3-mountain task, but provided conflicting visual experiences for subject and experimenter. The second experiment was designed to examine the child's ability to choose a representation of his own view and views of the experimenter when the experimenter was seated opposite and to the side of the child. Task variables and types of errors were investigated. Also, response latencies were measured to check whether responses on task were meaningful or indiscriminate. Results indicate that the young child's difficulty on traditional perspective-taking tasks is related to his lack of an integrated Euclidean spatial system and not to a lack of awareness that others have different visual perspectives. (GO)

This paper describes a methodological approach to the reading processes, involving the use of measures of speed of response or reaction time (RT) obtained from subjects while performing reading related tasks. Following a review of the literature on measures of RT, two experiments currently being done at the University of Minnesota are described and the methodology used is also discussed. The three main objectives of the two experiments were to investigate the relationships between (1) the ease of decoding and the speed of semantic processing, (2) the ease of decoding and the type of perceptual processing (serial or parallel), and (3) word length and speed of semantic processing. It was concluded from the evidence provided in the literature review and the experiments that RT can be a useful index when exploring the processes underlying reading. (RB)

This study investigates the hypothesis that reflective children have a tendency for detailed analysis of information whereas impulsive children process information more globally, and that differences in strategies of visual information processing of these two conceptual style groups lead to superior performance of reflective children insofar as the tasks commonly employed correspond to their processing strategy. New Matching Familiar Figures (MFF) problems were designed and administered to fourth grade children to tap both kinds of strategies. Impulsive children performed better on MFF problems that required "global" analysis than on problems that required "detail" analysis, while reflective children showed the opposite trend. On the basis of these results it is proposed that impulsive children analyze spatial information in large "chunks" and that reflective children analyze such information in small "chunks." It is further proposed that it takes less time to analyze a stimulus if large "chunks" are the units of analysis. It is concluded that although response latency is an important and stable indicator of cognitive style, accuracy varies according to the degree of compatibility between the subject's strategy of analysis and task requirements. No numerical data are included. (Author/SB)

The cognitive determinants of number analogy performance were studied by systematically manipulating the processing demands imposed by the items. To explore sources of developmental differences in analogical reasoning, subjects were included from two age levels, grades 4 and 5 and college. To allow the investigation of individual differences in reasoning ability, the children were selected to represent two general aptitude levels, average IQ and high IQ. The experimental number analogies correlated highly with the number analogies portion of a standardized intelligence test: the Analysis of Learning Potential. In each group a combination of domain-specific and general procedural knowledge factors accounted for more than 70% of the variance in item solution difficulty. The most critical processing demand affecting successful performance was the amount of solution-related information to be assembled and managed in working memory. Domain-specific and general procedural knowledge factors differentiated adults from children, while only specific, factual knowledge competencies seemed to differentiate between IQ levels in children. (Author/CP)

It has been demonstrated that effective use of "wait time" (up to three seconds) in teacher-student interchanges can result in spontaneous improvement in both cognitive and affective variables in the classroom. These changes are enhanced if information concerning wait time durations is supplemented by supportive interventions from persons who have studied tape recordings of teachers' interactions in the classroom. A 4-week study was conducted in which 10 teachers participated in workshops and evaluations of teacher behavior. Results are given in the following areas: (1) wait time; (2) percent of talk by students; (3) percent of higher level questions; (4) length of contributions by students; and (5) Piagetian operational level. Monitoring wait times using an electronic device accompanied by skilled analyses of tape recordings and supportive intervention provide an avenue to the improvement of teaching skills. A 12-item reference list concludes the document. (JD)

The effects of different types of feedback in computer assisted instruction were studied in 30 college students with different cognitive styles. The program, written in Apple Pilot and administered on an Apple IIE microcomputer, consisted of 16 problem solving tasks; for each, a graphic display and a textual question were presented. Two feedback treatments were used: knowledge of results--whether the response was correct or incorrect; and information--an explanation of the errors and strategies for correcting them. Cognitive styles, the moderator variables, were field dependence-independence and conceptual tempo (reflectivity-impulsivity). Four measures of performance were used as dependent variables: response time, error rate, number of attempts on each item, and number correct score. The results indicated that field dependent subjects had faster response times and fewer response errors when given an explanation of their errors and strategies for correcting them. Field independent subjects had lower response rates and fewer errors when given only an indication that an error had been made. Age and sex had minor effects on response time for some items. Conclusions regarding the design of feedback in courseware materials are included. (GDC)

Wait time, or the pauses between questions and responses, has been demonstrated to be an important factor influencing classroom learning. This paper reviews the key variables that have emerged in wait time research over the past 20 years. Progress in defining and measuring wait time has resulted in improved methodology for wait time research. Teacher training procedures have been improved through the use of several techniques, including modeling, pause feedback teaching aids, and strategies for modification of traditional classroom recitations, which lead to inquiry-based guided discussions and interactional dialogue patterns. Further research is needed to measure the effects of pauses and interaction patterns on affective transactions in the classroom. Research linking wait time variables with achievement outcomes is also needed. (GDC)

The effect of a relevant analogy and of subject visualization on the amount of cognitive capacity needed to process unfamiliar information about science was investigated. The dependent measure was reaction time on a secondary task while listening to six tape recorded passages about chemistry and physics in a 2 x 2 x 6 mixed design. The analogy treatment group required less cognitive capacity and the visualization treatment group required more cognitive capacity to process the materials. The analogy results support the theory that analogies make mental processing more efficient by modifying existing cognitive structures prior to processing the new information. The visualization results support a theory that visualizers devote more attention to the material being processed. A general similarity effect of organizing devices is suggested. (Author)

The purpose of this study was to determine how cognitive style instructions to respondents of a survey instrument affected the resulting psychometric properties of the scale. It was hypothesized that a group which is instructed to carefully respond will have a mean score further from the neutral point, a larger standard deviation, and a higher internal consistency, and will take more time in responding, than will a group which is instructed to immediately respond. Using an instrument designed to measure feelings about the manipulation of people in interpersonal situations, respondents were asked to either "carefully respond" or "immediately respond" to each item. The results suggested that neither the central tendency, dispersion, nor the reliability of the scores were strongly affected by type of directions. The amount of time spent in responding was only slightly affected. (DWH)

Elderly subjects and college-age subjects were compared on the strategy used to answer a question based on information in memory. The two strategies studied were direct retrieval and plausibility. The first experiment tested the hypothesis that older subjects will rely on the plausibility strategy more than young subjects. A second experiment tested the hypothesis that the different pattern of data is due to processing differences, not differences in the strength of episodic memory traces. Performance was slower in general for older subjects. However, older subjects also tended to modify their performance to minimize the detrimental effects of inferior retention of specifics. In some conditions, older subjects outperformed young subjects even in terms of response time. This resulted from their propensity to use a strategy that depends less on exact memory and that can be more efficient in some circumstances. This strategy involved using consistency as opposed to a careful inspection of the nature of relationships found in memory. (YLB)

This study attempted to evaluate the efficacy of time delay in increasing the academic response accuracy of moderately retarded adolescents. The time delay technique provided a means by which "cognitive organizers" could be taught to the students to mediate their behavior and improve academic performance. A modified multiple baseline alternating treatments design was used with junior high subjects in four special education classrooms, with each classroom having between 12 and 15 students. During the experimental phase of verbal prompt and time delay, the daily percentage of accurate oral student responses increased significantly over the baseline phase. Removing the verbal prompt and simply delaying student responses did not adversely affect accuracy. The study concluded that time delay can be a viable means of increasing response accuracy in moderately mentally retarded adolescents. The verbal prompt was needed only as a means of establishing stimulus control for the time delay technique. (JDD)

Although evidence is accumulating that the major reading difficulty dyslexics experience involves decoding and recognizing printed words, it is not clear that all dyslexics read poorly for the same reasons. A study investigated dyslexic children between 7 and 14 years of age to see if their reading errors and patterns of performance would enable them to be classified into subgroups. Forty-nine dyslexic children in grades 2 to 8 completed reaction time tasks which tested visual matching, sound and category matching, and word recognition. As control, a group of 58 normal readers in grades 1 to 8 also completed the tasks. Results grouped the dyslexic children into four types of severe reading deficiency: (1) decoding, (2) lexical access, (3) both decoding and lexical access, and (4) visual processing. A second study tested whether the subgroups showed deficits on non-reading tasks that would relate systematically to their area of reading difficulty. Subjects were 46 dyslexics and a comparable group of non-dyslexics who attempted tasks in rhyming, category matching, sound deletion, nonsense word decoding, picture matching, and picture copying. Most dyslexics in all four subgroups had difficulty with decoding nonsense words and sound deletion tasks; no group had difficulty with picture naming; the decoding group was deficient in rhyming; the lexical deficit group was deficient in category matching; the multiple deficits group had trouble with rhyming and category matching; and the visual deficits had difficulty with picture copying. While the study suggests that it may be fruitful to subdivide dyslexics based on area of difficulty, the results also show that dyslexics have certain characteristics in common. Possibly, dyslexics do not stay statically in one category, but change through time from the combined group to exhibiting a single deficit. (SKC)

A study compared the performance of congenitally deaf signers (N=39) and hearing individuals (N=39) on a bilateral tachistoscopic task. Subjects were exposed to pretested linguistic and nonlinguistic stimuli during the task. Analysis of response time indicated that deaf subjects were slower to respond than were hearing subjects across all categories of stimuli. Analysis of accuracy revealed a significant right visual field preference for deaf subjects across all stimulus types; no lateral preference was found for hearing subjects in relation to stimulus type. The findings suggest that strategy factors are a major influence on performance and that auditory experience is not prerequisite to a finding of lateral preference on a behavioral task. (Author/CB)

This study of teacher education graduate follow-up surveys examined the relationship between response rate and number of graduates, questionnaire length, and follow-up contacts. Also, the study investigated survey practices differentiating between surveys which had high and low return rates in such areas as number of follow-up contacts, questionnaire length, the use of incentives (including summary of the results), type of return postage, deadline for responding, use of visible identification numbers, and personalization of address on the envelope (inside address, salutation, and signature). A 41-item Teacher Preparation Follow-Up Survey Questionnaire was constructed and sent to 333 colleges and universities with teacher education program in order to determine which techniques and practices were being used in follow-up surveys of graduates of teacher education programs. Spearman correlation coefficients showed significant relationship between response rate and number of attempts to contact the graduates. The number of questions on the questionnaire was not significantly related to response rate, and the relationship between number of graduates surveyed and response rate was marginal. Mann-Whitney tests between high and low response rate groups showed significant differences on the number of attempts and the number of graduates. Chi-square comparisons of institutions with high and low response rates showed significant differences on several variables related to personalization. (BAE)

Two groups of five preschool children were trained to press a key for marbles for four sessions of variable ratio reinforcement (VR6). Subsequently, response decrement for the groups was compared during conditions of fixed and variable differential reinforcement of other behavior (DRO and VDRO). Fixed DRO was more effective for decreasing response rate. The differences were independent of original baseline response rates. Development of "superstitious" or other behavior during fixed DRO possibly facilitated the more effective response elimination in those conditions. (Author/MS)

Subjects learned and answered questions about four- or six-term linear orderings (e.g., Tom is taller than Dick, who is taller than Sam, who is taller than Pete). Such an ordering is comprised of some adjacent pairwise relations that are necessary to the establishment of the ordering (e.g., Tom is taller than Dick, Dick is taller than Sam), and some remote relations that are deducible (e.g., Tom is taller than Sam). Except for unusually fast responses to test sentences beginning with an end term, reaction time was a monotonic decreasing function of remoteness; the more remote the shorter the reaction time. This result contradicts several current models of how meaningful information is stored. First, it contradicts any model which argues that subjects do not store deducible information. Information pertaining to the deducible remote pairs is stored along with the information that was actually presented. Second, it contradicts any model which describes the form of the stored information in terms of inter-item associations. A model which can account for the result is presented. (Author)

Differences between formal constraints on a generative grammar and concepts of efficiency in transforming sentences provide different expectations regarding performance measures if the grammar is taken as a psychologically real model. To contrast these views, subjects were given sentences varying in voice, mood, and modality and asked to transform them to various syntactic patterns. Their response latencies were not clearly related to either grammatical or performance model expectations. Error frequencies, however, were related only to the performance model which assumed that subjects transform stimulus sentences directly into response patterns without using a kernel form as an intermediate, linking step. The use of formal grammatical models as if they reflected psychological processes is seen as being of questionable value. (Author)

Naming tasks were used in two studies to test for conceptual organization in young children by comparing the latencies for naming objects in primed vs. non-primed conditions. In the primed condition, a taxonomic category was primed by prior activation of a coordinate member of the same category. In Study 1, 54 kindergarten children were randomly assigned to a primed or non-primed condition. All subjects had to name as quickly as possible each of a series of five toy objects. Each of the first four was from a distinctly different semantic category. In the primed condition the fifth object was a member of the same taxonomic category as the fourth object. In the non-primed condition the fifth object was of a different semantic category from all the preceding objects. Results indicated that the mean latency was greater in the primed than in the non-primed condition. Study 2 attempted to replicate Study 1 using a within subjects design and a stronger priming manipulation to increase the strength of the effect. Subjects were 16 preschool and 2 kindergarten children. In the primed condition the fifth object in each series was from the same semantic category as the preceding two objects. All objects were from different categories in the non-primed condition. In both conditions a sixth object was added that was always from a different category than the fifth object. Again, the results indicated greater latencies for the primed condition. Three explanations of this hindrance effect are discussed: (1) a false set explanation, (2) a categorization decrement effect; and (3) a naming interference explanation. (Author/SB)