The purpose of this study was to examine the division procedures of preschool children to determine whether such procedures involved one-to-one correspondence. Large and small numerosity trials were included so that the amount of effort and ease of using other procedures would vary. Odd and even number trials were included to determine whether…

This paper presents a framework for conceptualizing the different ways in which instructions in experimental tasks may be misunderstood. Five possible types of misunderstandings are identified and discussed: (1) misunderstanding of a particular term in the instructions; (2) misinterpretation of a task because the instructions are difficult to…

Preschool children's association of the correct name with a clearly identified graphic form during an alphabet naming process is examined in this study. Subjects were 139 children (ages 2, 3, 4, and 5 years) who were asked individually to identify 52 cards, each with a single upper or lower case letter printed on it. Analysis of data was based on…

This study investigated how preadolescents and adolescents solve problems involving three temporal dimensions. Specifically examined was the question of whether speed and space information would influence the time judgments of 90 subjects 9, 12, and 15 years of age who solved 16 word problems describing the displacements of two cars. The problems…

A seriation task (assembling a set of nesting cups) was used in this study to examine developmental changes in young children's ability to restructure a situation. Forty young children, eight each at 18, 24, 30, 36, and 40 months of age, participated in the study. Each child was presented with five nesting cups and was told he or she could play…

Children's self-control behavior in motor and cognitive tasks was examined in a series of two studies in which modeling and self-regulatory mechanisms were varied to assess the influence of each. In the first study, 6-, 7-, 9-, and 11-year-old children individually played a 20-trial game of 'Simon Says' (involving activation and inhibition trials)…

A study of young children's assignment of nouns to gender categories and general mastery of the Icelandic gender system is reported. An examination of what is involved in the induction of formal categories such as gender introduces the proposal of a "principle of localness." This principle states that the closer in proximity a closed…

In recent research, two qualitatively different classes of mental operations have been identified. The performance of one type of cognitive task requires attention, in the sense of mental effort, for its execution, while the second type can be performed automatically, independent of attentional control. Further research has shown that automatic…

This research explored the thesis that mental model construction can be an effective instructional strategy for mental models learning by constructing a prototype that embodies this approach. The mental model to be learned was the Internet, including the components of the Internet, their functions, and their relationships to one another. To do…