Young (mean age = 23.41 years) and older (mean age = 69.41 years) adults studied a list of 80 words. They were tested immediately and 7 days later for both yes/no recognition and for ability to complete fragments such as E D L M, with words, some of which had been studied previously. The fragment completion task was not described as a memory test and subjects were encouraged to respond to all word fragments. Younger adults scored higher on recognition than older adults but not on fragment completion. These results, similar to those obtained with amnesics, suggest that older adults are impaired on tasks which require a conscious effort to recognize an event but that memory without awareness is unaffected by age.

The issue of whether young (19-37 years) and older (57-84 years) adults differ in their use of pragmatic information in anaphor resolution was explored in three experiments. Subjects were required to select the antecedent for the pronoun he in sentence pairs such as Henry spoke at a meeting while John drove to the beach. He brought along a surfboard, \bung and older adults were equally influenced by contextual constraints in choosing pronoun referents when the sentence containing the pronoun followed immediately after the context-setting sentence. When extraneous material intervened, however, both age groups became less consistent in their pronoun choices, with older adults being more affected. Evidence is presented that failure to use pragmatic constraints in pronoun assignment results from inability lo recall the relevant contextual information.The research reported here was supported in part by National Institute on Aging Grant 2 R01 AG02452.Jenee Todd assisted in preparation of materials and collection of data for Experiment 1. We gratefully acknowledge the comments of Deborah Burke, Patricia Anderson, and Elizabeth Zelinski on an earlier draft of this article.

A B S T R A C TAcross the nation, librarians work with caregivers and children to encourage engagement in their early literacy programs. However, these early literacy programs that libraries provide have been left mostly undocumented by research, especially through quantitative methods. Valuable Initiatives in Early Learning that Work Successfully (VIEWS2) was designed to test new ways to measure the effectiveness of these early literacy programs for young children (birth to kindergarten), leveraging a mixed methods, quasi-experimental design. Using two innovative tools, researchers collected data at 120 public library storytimes in the first year of research, observing approximately 1,440 children ranging from birth to 60 months of age. Analysis of year-one data showed a correlation between the early literacy content of the storytime program and children's outcomes in terms of early literacy behaviors. These findings demonstrate that young children who attend public library storytimes are responding to the early literacy content in the storytime programs. S torytimes have long been an iconic part of children's services at the public library. The historical version of storytime, story hours, was created in the 1940s to expose children to books and to support a love of reading in young children. In the mid-1950s, librarians began to place an active emphasis on using storytimes to support literacy in young children (Albright, Delecki, and Hinkle 2009). More than 60 years later, storytimes continue to focus on supporting children's early literacy skills and serve as the pillar for a large array of learningfocused library programming designed to reach children from the ages of birth to kindergarten.In fact, 61.5 % of 3.57 million programs provided by public libraries were designed for children

Because recent initiatives highlight the need to better support preschool-aged children’s math and science learning, the present study investigated the impact of professional development in these domains for early childhood educators. Sixty-five educators were randomly assigned to experience 10.5 days (64 hours) of training on math and science or on an alternative topic. Educators’ provision of math and science learning opportunities were documented, as were the fall-to-spring math and science learning gains of children (n = 385) enrolled in their classrooms. Professional development significantly impacted provision of science, but not math, learning opportunities. Professional development did not directly impact children’s math or science learning, although science learning was indirectly affected via the increase in science learning opportunities. Both math and science learning opportunities were positively associated with children’s learning. Results suggest that substantive efforts are necessary to ensure that children have opportunities to learn math and science from a young age.

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