A study investigated the effects of instruction on students' persuasive writing at two grade levels (third and fifth), and determined the categories and types of written persuasion used by students at four grade levels (3rd, 5th, 10th, and 12th). The first objective, determining instructional effects, was accomplished by specifically instructing…

Previous research in classification preference has focused on only a few selected age groups. To investigate the classification preferences of individuals from early childhood through old age in the same study, 144 individuals between the ages of 4 and 70 completed a revised version of the Conceptual Styles Test. Analysis of results showed that…

Studied the enjoyment and comprehension of riddles and nonriddles by first, third, and fifth grade normal children. Also investigated the relationship of sex to the enjoyment of humor. (SDH)

An investigation of the category-recall relationship using first, third, and fifth graders as subjects. Recall was found to be a function of the number of categories in the sort, and there were no differences in recall among the three retrieval conditions. (Author/SDH)

The use by 254 Canadian children of the dimensions of gender, language/ethnicity, and body type as bases of categorization was examined. A developmental approach was taken to see whether a sequence exists in the relative predominance of these dimensions; to examine the relation between the salience of these dimensions and cognitive developmental…

A total of 80 children 4 to 7 years of age participated in a study attempting to establish (1) the frequency of classification performance by age and in relation to available classification criteria, and (2) the degree of preference for different classification criteria by age, particularly differences between figurative and operative criteria.…

The way cognitive, event-related brain potentials (ERPs) can aid in further understanding of memory span change in children is discussed. ERPs are time-dependent changes in electrical activity of the brain (as recorded by scalp electrodes) following the presentation of a physical stimulus through auditory, visual, or somatosensory modalities. The…

Four different kinds of story were presented to children aged 4,7, and 10 years and to adults. In the stories, the relationship between basic-level referents mentioned in the first part of the story and the related superordinates mentioned in the second part was changed by means of different kinds of articles introducing the superordinates:…

As children grow older they show an increasing preference for classifying objects on the basis of shape rather than color. To clarify the nature of this "dimension preference," children of ages 3 1/2 to 6 1/2 years were given a method of triads test of dimension preferences, followed (after a week's delay) by a component selection task. The most…

Metaphors of similarity and proportionality, together with a pictorial form of similarity metaphors, proverbs, and several Piaget-type cognitive tasks, were given to 50 boys aged 5 through 13 years. Results indicated that metaphor comprehension is a type of classificatory behavior, the development of which is related to maturing cognitive…

Coordination and integration of class information was examined using a multidimensional similarity judgment task in which four- and nine-year-old children rated the similarity of pairs of stimuli sharing either one or two attribute values. (Author/MP)

Two sets of tasks designed to measure operational thinking and the problem-finding skill of asking general questions were administered to 7-, 9-, and 11-year-old children. Analyses performed on the quality of the children's questions revealed developmental trends consistent with earlier work on problem finding. (Author/JMB)

Reported an experiment on the effects of taxonomic organization on 7- and 11-year-olds' free and cued recall of two- and four-category lists. Analysis used a stages-of-learning model that simultaneously delivered estimates of the impact of these manipulations on storage and retrieval components of recall. (Author/CB)

Describes two studies that demonstrate young children's perception of color materials differs from that of adults in two ways: (1) the stimulus dimensions of hue, chroma, and value appear to result in somewhat more separable perception for young children than for adults, and (2) the perceived similarities the color materials are not the same for…

Tests the hypothesis that habituation of attention to irrelevant information can account for within-task improvement in selective attention--that children who are preexposed to stimuli that will later be irrelevant in a speeded classification task will experience less interference than children not given the opportunity to habituate. (HOD)