As science teachers, we often show animations and videos in class but there is the potential for students to create their own animations to represent science concepts and thus make their conceptions visible for critique and refinement. This encourages students to be active in their own learning, creating animations rather than just viewing them.…

This paper reports findings in relation to one aspect of the "I Go to School" research project carried out in South Australia which tracked children attending integrated pre-school/childcare centres as they made their transition to school. Eight centres participated in the study involving 347 children. In order to measure some of the…

The relationship between learning ability and intelligence has continually been a focus of theory and research. It is argued in this paper that the inconclusive results of studies relating individual differences variables such as intellectual abilities to learning are due to a too pragmatic, theoretical orientation. Theoretical models explicating…

A group of 45 undergraduates discussed a moral issue with a confederate who had the same opinion (no-controversy) or opposite opinion (controversy). Subjects in the controversy conditions were induced to have a high level of defensiveness by a disconfirmation of personal competence or a low level of defensiveness by a confirmation. Subjects in…

In this ethnographic study of summer undergraduate research (UR) experiences at four liberal arts colleges, where faculty and students work collaboratively on a project of mutual interest in an apprenticeship of authentic science research work, analysis of the accounts of faculty and student participants yields comparative insights into the…

Investigated was the distinction between identity conservation and equivalence conservation in 180 preschool, kindergarten and third grade students. Ss were assigned to one of six different counterbalanced orders of presentation for the conservation task battery. The factors were age, task (identity/equivalence), criterion (judgment only/judgment…

Forty elderly adults were required to memorize a list of 15 simple nouns belonging to three separate categories. The arrangement of the list of nouns (randomized or completely categorized) and instructions (instructed that the nouns could be in terms of categories or not instructed) were manipulated as factors. Individuals participating in the…

Two experiments investigated the role of children's spontaneous conceptual "biases" in pictorial discrimination learning. The results suggested that such biases may serve either to facilitate or to interfere with discrimination learning. Moreover, in each experiment, age by treatment interactions revealed that in comparison to the behavior of…

Assesses how similar same-sex friends are in their level of moral development. Results indicate significant relationships only for male-female dyads. The functions of different dyadic friendships are discussed, including Piaget's and Kohlberg's ideas that peers have a role in promoting cognitive growth. (Author/BEF)

Five elementary school groups, or cohorts, were given the Test Anxiety Scale for Children and the Lie Scale for Children on three occasions over a year's time. This paper examines the results cross-sectionally and reveals between-group, or cohort effects. The youngest and oldest cohorts displayed low anxiety. Within-group longitudinal changes did…

This issue of the bi-yearly publication contains 11 articles grouped under three headings: Developmental Cognitive/ Perceptual Studies, Development of Assessment Tools Studies, and Effective Learning Studies. The research was carried out at the Lida Lee Tall Learning Resources Center on the campus of Towson (Md.) State University. This is a…

Matrix tasks to assess multiple classifications and multiple seriation skills were administered to 160 children (40 Ss each from preschool, kindergarten, first and second grade levels). Each child received six matrix subtasks (reproduction and transportation of cross classification I, double seriation, and cross classification II) in one of six…

Using a sample of 77 10th grade boys, the researchers studied the relationships between the mental abilities measured by the Differential Aptitude Tests and cerebral dominance (CD: the extent to which one hemisphere of the brain dominates the other for control of behavior). The surprise finding was that CD was negatively related to spatial…

Piaget and Inhelder, in The Child's Conception of Space (1956), described the coordination of viewpoints (CV) spatial operation as one of the prerequisites to the development of the rotation and development (RD) spatial operation. This study investigated this developmental dependency notion and also evaluated the effects of age and sex on the…

The study reported in this paper traces the nature of the changes which take place as the child gradually acquires perspective-taking skills. The results indicate that at first the young child can correctly represent only the location of the object nearest another observer; later, he can correctly represent a before-behind relationship between…