Abstract
A 72-item questionnaire was administered to 97 elementary school children in Grades 3 to 6. An attempt was made to assess the effect of asking the same basic type of question, when the following variations were independently introduced: (1) presence or absence of a negative in the statement of the question, (2) truth value of the statement to be answered, and (3) form of presentation of the material. All three variations produced some statistically significant results, such that number of errors was correlated with “mental steps” of decoding necessary for solution. Developmental differences with respect to the tasks were noted, such that certain discriminations were made earlier than others within the variations.
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