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Media reports are an important source of new scientific knowledge, and this information can affect the decision making process. This study explores how formal educational settings prepare students to evaluate informal scientific information. Participants in this study came from different science backgrounds, including adults who did not study post secondary studies and university students from different majors. The differences among the participants were investigated. (YDS)

The cutoff method was used on longitudinal data in more than one content domain in a study attempting to determine whether the effects of schooling are general or limited. Conservation of number, an informally acquired skill, and mental addition, a formally acquired skill, were evaluated among older kindergarten children, younger 1st-grade children, and older lst-grade children. Older kindergarten children and younger 1st-grade children were about the same age; younger and older lst-grade children had the same amount of schooling. The conservation data indicated that improvements in performance were due primarily to age rather than schooling, and improvements in the accuracy of mental addition were due primarily to schooling rather than age. This pattern of results has three implications: (1) young and old children are equally ready to benefit from the kinds of counting and arithmetic operations that are emphasized in school; (2) schooling seems to have relatively specific effects on performance; and (3) the cutoff method can be quite useful for discovering which kinds of skills are acquired as a function of schooling or age, and for addressing questions about children's readiness for acquiring certain kinds of knowledge. It is concluded that as results accumulate, priority should be given to the construction of a coherent picture of the effects of early schooling on cognitive and academic development. (RH)

Because little is presently known about changes in children's knowledge of the logical principles of arithmetic and, more specifically, about how children's developing knowledge is reflected in the use of solution procedures, two types of three-term arithmetic problems were presented for solution to 6-, 7-, 9-, 11-, and 20-year-olds. Problems were to be solved mentally. One type could be solved only by calculating sums and differences. The other type could also be solved without computation by using a procedural shortcut based on the logical principle of inversion, i.e., a + b - b must be equal to a. Analyses of latencies and verbal reports revealed that: (1) some children as young as 6 years of age used inversion-based shortcuts spontaneously; (2) there were marked individual differences among elementary school children in the use of inversion-based shortcuts; (3) the use of procedural shortcuts based on knowledge of logical principles increased markedly between 9 and 20 years but changed little from 6 to 9 years; and (4) some 6-year-olds used a functional shortcut, the negation procedure, that may be a precursor to inversion-based procedures. It is concluded that the results indicate that early improvements in arithmetic may reflect changes in computational skill rather than in knowledge and use of the logical principles that characterize the domain of arithmetic. (Author/RH)

To determine whether children's knowledge of arithmetic facts becomes increasingly "automatic" with age, 7-year-olds, 11-year-olds, and adults were given a number-matching task for which mental arithmetic should have been irrelevant. Specifically, students were required to verify the presence of a probe number in a previously presented pair (e.g., 5+1 followed by 5). Eleven-year-olds and adults were slower to reject a probe that was the sum of the initial pair (e.g., 5+1 and 6) than to reject a probe that was not the sum (e.g., 5+1 and 3). This finding indicates that, in older children and adults, obligatory activation of a sum interferes with a required response. No evidence for obligatory activation was found for 7-year-olds. These results tend to be consistent with current models of arithmetic knowledge, and they suggest that one aspect of the development of arithmetic skill is the automatic retrieval of stored facts. (Author/TW)

Evaluation of 95 students in grades 3 and 6 on measures of mathematics anxiety, test anxiety, and attitudes toward mathematics found that test and problem-solving anxiety took 2 distinct forms. Mathematics test anxiety increased with age relative to problem-solving anxiety. (SLD)

Reviews research on the development of academic skills in arithmetic and early reading, emphasizing the individual cognitive processes occurring during learning. Offers implications for the development of new methods of assessment that stress processes, rather than just products. Suggests that researchers in cognitive development and assessment collaborate. Contains 76 references. (KS)