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Children in Grades 2 through 5 from Korea, Japan, and the United States reported on their interests and perceived competence in a variety of academically and socially related domains and indicated their views on gender advantages in areas of interest. Comparisons by country, gender, and age were conducted. Children made many similar responses across countries. Predicted differences suggesting greater academic interests and perceived competence among children from Korea and Japan and social interests among children from Japan were only partially supported. In many cases, the responses of American and Korean children were most alike. American children generally had the highest perceived competence. Interest in words and numbers but not ideas declined with age across countries. Gender differences were common and often stronger than differences between countries or ages. Across countries, boys showed more interest and perceived competence for numbers and things, whereas girls showed more interest and perceived competence for words.

This experiment attempted to replicate Marx's (1982) report that transfer (anagram solutions) was inhibited both by more frequent occurrence of target words in a word-completion exercise and by the prior recall of the target words. We substantially confirmed both of these inhibitory factors, but especially the prior recall: Target words that had occurred only once but had been recalled were subsequently retrieved relatively more often than were singly occurring but unrecalled words by a mere 1% (5/342)of the subjects. Other reliable main effects and interactions were found for the time intervals before free recall and before cued-retrieval testing and for the word-frequency variable. Interpretation of the inhibitory effect of prior recall on learnedresponse availability was tentatively made in terms of a Zeigarnik-like function.

Four experiments were conducted to compare developmental changes in free recall and frequency judgement. In Experiment 1, 1012 Korean students were shown a series of animal names and then asked to recall them and to estimate the frequency with which they had occurred. The poorest performance on both tasks was by primary-school students and the best by secondary-sch ool students; college students were interm ediate in performance. Essentially similar results were obtained in Experiment 2, with an additional 288 Korean students, except that secondary-sch ool students did not perform better than college students. In this experim ent, there was complete control of item speci city over frequency and any possible clustering effect was eliminated by using unrelated words rather than animal names. In Experiment 3, the developmental trends in frequency judgement were replicated with 193 American students. Those developmental trends were obtained with another 186 American students in Experiment 4 using relative frequency judgements. Retrospectiv e reports about how frequency judgements were made suggested a developmental shift from more literal counting strategies to more intuitive strength impression judgements. The results are interpreted as suggesting the need for some modi cation of the Hasher and Zacks (1979, 1984) ageinvariance proposition for frequency judgement.

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Data were collected from 684 South Korean 11th-graders in 36 groups of 19 each. They first completed three-or four-letter Korean words, each with one letter provided, using associatedmeaning cues. The words occurred one, two, or three times in the list. Half of the students performed (made the actual response), and the other half observed the performance. Then 0, I, or 7 days later, they were given an unexpected free-recall test. The final cued-retrieval test was administered 0,1, or 7 days thereafter. The students were instructed to form two Korean words, again using associated-meaning cues, from each of 24 six-to eight-letter anagrams. In each letter string, one word had been used in the initial word-completion task and one had not. The major results were that females showed not only the usual superiority in retaining verbal materials, but also greater resistance to the inhibiting effects of a single prior recall on subsequent cued retrieval (Marx, 1982;Marx & Kim, 1984-a prior report of part of this experi· ment). Female superiority in free recall was due largely to less forgetting of the more frequently completed words over the longer test intervals. Male performers retrieved more words than male observers. Overall, performers recalled more words than observers, mainly the words that had been completed two or three times. The various interactions obtained confirm and extend those previously reported for gender and task variables.We report here some interrelated effects of gender and frequency of occurrence of target words, test interval, and performance or observation in acquisition on free recall and subsequent cued retrieval. In the experiment, the free-recall test was manipulated in order to influence subsequent cued retrieval. Because the primary questions addressed by the experiment were entirely different from the present ones, the present data were not included in the previous report of the experiment (Marx & Kim, 1984).Manipulation of the performance/observation variable was intended to replicate certain earlier results. Briefly, these have shown superior acquisition under performance (subject makes response) compared with observation (subject watches perforrner and receives equivalent feedback , if provided) conditions (Marx, Homer,

Fifty South Korean preschoolers were given ordinality and cardinality problems. None of the 20 children in the two younger groups (mean ages 27 and 33 months) solved either problem. All but one of the 16 39-month-olds and all 14 of the 45-month-olds solved the ordinality problem. The more difficult cardinality problem was solved by only 2 of the 39-month-olds and 9 of the 45-month-olds. There was an interaction among the variables of age, test type, and test order: Problem difficulty did not vary with test order for the 39-month-olds, but the 45-month-olds performed better on the cardinality problem when it occurred ftrst and better on the ordinality problem when it occurred after cardinality.