Poor social functioning and limited play are characteristic of children with autism. Increasingly, education for children with autism is provided within mainstream settings, but given their particular difficulties, the adequate provision of educational services in such settings is challenging. This study presents observational data of the play behaviour and social interaction patterns of 10 children with autism in mainstream kindergartens and primary school playgrounds. The target children differed significantly in terms of their play and social interactions from typically developing children in the same settings. The adequacy of the provision of services for children with autism in mainstream provision is discussed.

There has been a long-standing dispute about the efficacy of computer assisted instruction (CAI) with regard to the interpretation of effect size estimates in reviews using techniques of meta-analysis. It has been claimed that the data used to calculate these estimates come from studies which are methodologically flawed. The aim of this study was to provide an updated meta-analysis on the learning effect of (CAI) over a broad range of study features with particular attention focused on the effectiveness debate. Using standard procedures, the results and estimates were similar to previous reviews and showed a learning benefit for CAI. The mean effect size for CAI was (.24) for the years 1987-1992, with more recent studies showing an average of (.33). Although moderate, these estimates tended to raise the average student from at least the 50th and 60th percentile. However, studies which controlled for teacher and materials, and were of longer duration, and studies using pencil and paper equivalents of CAI showed no learning advantage over traditional forms of instruction. It is suggested that what accounts for the typical learning advantage of CAI in this meta-analysis and others is the better quality instruction provided by CAI materials. These materials seem versatile enough to be used effectively over a broad range of subjects and educational settings. While the materials did not seem to improve substantially over the past two decades as reflected by effect sizes, these estimates did not include the newer multimedia technology. It is concluded that educational approaches should be judged by a number of criteria including achievement gains and when this is done CAI may far surpass other forms of instruction. *This research was supported by a grant from Telecom, NZ. Special thanks are extended to Bill Flinn for provision of the combinational formulae used for the statistical analysis.

ABSTfmT The development of a "theory of mind" may not only be important for understanding the minds of others but also for using one's own mind. To investigate this supposition, 40 children between the ages of three and four were given false belief and creativity tasks. The numbers of appropriate and of original responses in the creativity test were found to correlate positively with performance on falsebelief tasks. This association was robust, as it continued to be strong and significant even when age and verbal intelligence were partialled out. The results support the hypothesis that the metarepresentational skills involved in theory of mind also affect the way children can access and scan their own mental repertoire beyond the areas of currently activated content (i.e. divergent thinking).With the advent of theory of mind a basic cognitive shift takes place in human development, and possibly took place in cognitive evolution.

Much research has recently been devoted to the study of the development of a representational theory of mind. By about age 4 most children understand that people, including they themselves, may misrepresent the world (e.g., Flavell, Flavell, & Green, 1983; Gopnik & Astington, 1988;Moore, Pure, & Furrow, 1990; Perrier, Leekam, & Wimmer, 1987;Wimmer & Perrier, 1983). This understanding of false belief is evidence for a representational theory of mind, because it implies an understanding that mental states are attitudes to representations of the world, rather than attitudes to direct copies of reality (Dennett, 1978;Wimmer & Perrier, 1983). Although some research suggests that even 3-year-old children may be able to pass simpler versions of classic theory-of-mind tasks (Chandler & Hala, 1994;Saltmarsh, Mitchell, & Robinson, 1995;Sullivan & Winner, 1993) and may have an implicit understanding of belief (Clements & Perrier, 1994, many researchers maintain the traditional view that fundamental cognitive changes are responsible for 4-year-olds' understanding of false beliefs (e.g., Flavell, 1993;Olson, 1993;Perner, 1995). This research was supported by a Telecom New Zealand research grant to Claire M. Fletcher-Flinn.We thank the children, parents, and teachers of the participating kindergartens. We are grateful to Linda Harris for her assistance in testing the children. We appreciate the thoughtful comments by Michael Corballis and Thomas Keenan on an earlier version of this manuscript.The participating children were a subset of a larger study on the effects of computers on young children. The falsebelief data is expected to be published also in the context of this computer project.Manuscript

Psychology Lab A produces data on accuracy levels for the naming of nonwords from a sample of skilled adult readers, but Lab B, using the same stimuli and procedures, produces highly divergent results from another sample matched in age and reading skill. This is not an imaginary illustration. It was our prediction on the basis of (1) knowledge of the divergent types of reading instruction with which the two samples of adults learned to read when they entered elementary school, (2) published research on the differential effects of these types of instruction on children's reading processes, and (3) theory on developmental continuity in reading processes from early childhood to adulthood.What justifies a prediction of developmental continuity into adulthood of reading processes arising from the type of instruction received in early childhood? Justification comes only from theory, since there is no relevant empirical evidence. In the theory of Ziegler and Goswami (2005), orthographic-phonological units can be of various grain sizes. When children learn to read English, traditional explicit phonics instruction is said to influence them toward use of the smallest grain size, letter-phoneme units, rather than toward larger units. Nevertheless, it is argued that in English orthography, these small grain size correspondences are often inconsistent, and beginning readers have to learn additional correspondences of larger grain size that can offer greater consistency. Continuity of reading processes from childhood to adulthood is a feature of the theory, although there is no reference to continuity of the influence of the type of instruction.On the other hand, in the influential theory of acquisition of reading skill presented by Share (1995), there is a major shift in cognitive processes beyond the beginner level. There is also the claim that satisfactory progress by beginning readers requires teaching of simple explicit grapheme-phoneme correspondences. Children's processes of mapping orthographic information into phonological information are said to shift from use of these taught letter-sound relationships (predominantly context free) to use of those relationships that children implicitly induce from their acquired reading vocabulary of familiar words, including those relationships dependent on context in words. Share cited as evidence the developmental decline of regularization errors and of the regularity effect that gives a reading performance advantage for words with regular spellings over those with irregular ones. This University of Auckland, Auckland, New ZealandDoes the type of reading instruction experienced during the initial years at school have any continuing effect on the ways in which adults read words? The question has arisen in current discussions about computational models of mature word-reading processes. We tested predicted continuing effects by comparing matched samples of skilled adult readers of English who had received explicit phonics instruction in childhood and those who had not. In responding...