Gordon A. Hale

Developmental Trends in Children's Component Selection.

Abstract A new method is introduced for assessing childrens component selection—i.e., the disposition to attend to a single feature of multifaceted stimuli. Eight-year-old children were found to exercise component selection to a lesser degree than 4-year-olds; while children at both age levels attended primarily to one stimulus component (shape), the older children showed a moderate amount of attention to a secondary redundant feature (color) as well. However, a comparable age difference in attention deployment was not observed when a single stimulus dimension (shape) was “relevant” in two variant tasks. These results imply a developmentally increasing ability to distinguish between conditions in which attending to redundant stimulus information can and cannot be useful. That this ability undergoes little further development beyond age 8 was suggested in a second experiment with 8- and 12-year-olds in which the three tasks produced relatively similar developmental trends in performance.

Student Major Field and Text Content: Interactive Effects on Reading Comprehension in the Test of English as a Foreign Language.

It was hypothesized that a students academic discipline would interact with the text content in determining performance on the reading passages of the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). To test this hypothesis, the present study examined performance on the reading passages in TOEFL forms used in four operational test administrations. The results supported the hypothesis, as students in the two key major-field groups, the humanities/social sciences and the biological/physical sciences, performed better on passages related to their own groups than on other passages. The effect was significant for three of the four test forms. The effect was relatively small in each case, however, as expressed in terms of points on the TOEFL scale, perhaps because TOEFL reading passages are drawn from general readings rather than specialized text books. Thus, it is important to distinguish between the statistical significance and the practical significance of the effect.

The relation of multiple-choice cloze items to the Test of English as a Foreign Language

Four categories of multiple-choice (MC) cloze items were examined in relation to the TOEFL. The object was to assess the factor structure of the TOEFL and the potential of distinguishing MC cloze items aimed at reading comprehension (defined in terms of textual constraints ranging across clauses) as contrasted with knowledge of grammar (short-range surface syntax and morphology) or vocabulary. Since it is impossible in principle to distinguish such skills absolutely at any given point in a text, a compromise was to identify items whose difficulty seemed to be based primarily on one level of processing and secondarily on another. The pivotal category was reading comprehension. In all, 50 MC cloze items over three texts were used in four subsets: ones for which reading comprehension seemed to be the primary source of difficulty, and (1) grammar secondary or (2) vocabulary secondary (nine and 14 items respec tively) ; and ones for which either (3) grammar or (4) vocabulary was the main source of difficulty and reading comprehension secondary (15 and 12 items). Results were analysed separately for each of nine language groups, with a total of 11,290 subjects in all. Factor analysis of the TOEFL suggested two factors related to (a) the Listening Comprehension section, and (b) the nonlistening subsections. The data did not clearly reveal the expected differential relations between the MC cloze categories and subsections of the TOEFL, though tendencies were apparent and analyses on the whole revealed substantial reliability and validity for the MC cloze items.