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This study investigated the relationship between personality and anxiety characteristics of Japanese students and their oral performance in English. The participants were 73 native-speakers of Japanese who were studying English at various language schools in New Zealand. They were administered the Maudsley Personality Inventory, the Spielberger State Anxiety Inventory, and a story-retelling task which was scored in terms of oral fluency, accuracy, complexity, and global impression. Significant correlations were found between extraversion and global impression scores, and state anxiety and clause accuracy scores. These findings suggest that participants who were more extraverted produced better global impressions during their oral performance, and those who were experiencing higher levels of state anxiety made more errors in their spoken use of clauses.

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This study investigated the effects of process mnemonic (PM) instruction on the computational skills performance of 13- to 14-year-old students with mathematics learning disabilities. Two experiments are described. In Experiment 1, 29 students were randomly assigned to one of four instruction groups: PM, demonstration-imitation (DI), study skills (SS), or no instruction (NI). In Experiment 2, instructors with no vested interest in the outcomes of the study were employed to teach 28 students who were assigned to PM, DI, or NI groups. Both PM and DI students made significant improvements in addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. However, improvements were often greater for PM students. More importantly, the improvements made by PM students maintained better than those of DI students over six-week (Experiment 1) and eight-week (Experiment 2) follow-up periods.

Diagrams are effective tools for problem solving. However, previous findings indicate that students generally do not use diagrams spontaneously. This study examined task-related factors that may influence the spontaneity of diagram use. Experiment 1 compared two possible explanations: the first, that the length-relatedness of the story context of the problem (i.e. whether it involves the measurement of length) determines the likelihood of diagram use; and the second, that the cognitive cost of transforming the situation described in the word problem to an abstract diagrammatic representation is the more important factor. Four math word problems, differing in their story context and structure, were administered to eighth-grade Japanese students (n=125) to solve. The results provide support for the cognitive transformation cost explanation. The results of experiment 2, in which the problems were administered to students in both Japan (n=291) and New Zealand (n=323), confirm this finding.