This study assessed the relation of teachers' ratings of young children's abilities, classroom skills, and personal-social characteristics to achievement in school. Teachers' ratings of 217 children were obtained in the fall and spring of kindergarten and again in second and third grades. By the end of the third grade, 146 children remained in the sample. A total of 63 teachers participated. Predictive validity of the ratings was high for both concurrent and subsequent achievement by the children. The sum of four ratings (Effective Learning, Retaining Information, Vocabulary, and Following Instructions) predicted achievement nearly as well as the entire battery of ratings. Average ratings were consistently higher for girls than for boys. Ratings made by mothers were less predictive of scholastic success than were ratings made by teachers.
This study examined strategic and semantic aspects of the answers given by preschool children to class inclusion problems. The Piagetian logical model for class inclusion was contrasted with an alternative, problem processing model in three experiments. A major component of the alternative model is an enumeration strategy which is advantageous for learning reliable counting skills. The counting strategy was found to explain the inclusion errors of young children better than did the logic of the task. It was also found that young children understand the semantics of inclusion but are unable to coordinate their semantic knowledge with their counting strategy. Methodologically, one of the experiments suggested a fruitful extension of task analysis (Simon, 1%9) to experimental design.
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