ABSTRACT
The second set of data shown in Table 10.2 was collected from a sample of primary school children. Each child completed the Embedded Figures Test (EFT; Witkin, Oltman, Raskin, and Karp, 1971), which measures
field dependence, i.e., the extent to which a person can abstract the logical structure of a problem from its context (higher scores indicate less abstraction). Then, the children were randomly allocated to one of two experimental groups and timed as they constructed a 3 × 3 pattern from nine colored blocks, taken from the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC, Wechsler, 1974). The two groups differed in the instructions they were given for the task. The row group was told to start with a row of three blocks and the corner group was told to start with a corner of three blocks. The age of each child in months was also recorded. Children were allowed up to ten minutes to complete the task, after which time the experimenter intervened to show children who had not finished the correct solution. Such censored observations are shown as 600+ in the table. For this study, it is the effects of the covariates, EFT, age, and experimental group on time to completion of the task that are of interest.
