The origins and development of our geometric intuitions have been debated for millennia. The present study links children's developing intuitions about the properties of planar triangles to their developing abilities to read purely geometric maps. Six-year-old children are limited when navigating by maps that depict only the sides of a triangle in…

This paper attempts to investigate five and six-year old children's ability to formulate logical reasoning. More specifically, our interest focuses on the investigation of young children's ability to use arguments based on logical reasoning. Can pre-school children build arguments based on logical reasoning such as deductive reasoning, or forms of…

The present studies investigated children's and adults' intuitive beliefs about the physical nature of essences. Adults and children (ranging in age from 6 to 10 years old) were asked to reason about 2 different ways of determining an unknown object's category: taking a tiny internal sample from any part of the object (distributed view of essence)…

Discussed are research methods used to measure developmental changes in children's reasoning about ability. While adults generally differentiate ability, effort, luck, and task difficulty as causes for success and failure, children progressively think that effort or outcome is ability (level 1), that effort is the cause of performance outcomes…

A survey of undergraduate education methods texts indicates that students are repeatedly exposed to the theories of Jean Piaget, with an emphasis on the stages of development and characteristics of preschool children. The suggestion is made that an evaluation should be undertaken of misconceptions that undergraduate students might develop as a…

This paper examines the cognitive process of concept development in preschool children, based on recent psychological research. Rather than attempting an exhaustive review of the more than 7000 articles written on children's concepts of categories, the paper highlights and illustrates four key themes that emerge from recent research: first,…

Comprehension of metaphor was examined in 36 children ranging in age from 55 months to 186 months. The subjects were audiotaped while answering questions about a target sentence that was contextually anomalous. Five pictures were drawn to accompany each story, two relating to the literal meaning of the target sentence, two to the metaphoric…

Shows a wide variety of task performance ability. Supports the hypothesis that the tasks require the use of the same or a unified set of cognitive processes. (RL)

The use of symbols in the play of young children during the preoperational period of cognitive development provides the foundation in representation that will be needed later when using higher abstract forms such as written words. (JN)

Babies are active participants in their learning and need to explore a variety of objects. Nurturing relationships support these explorations. Objects are more clearly remembered and understood. Thus, one activity this article suggests doing with a 12-month-old to encourage abstract thinking, is talking about how squeezing the bottle of ketchup…

A study charting the development of grade school children's analogic reasoning used 26 second, fourth, fifth, and sixth grade students from lower middle class and higher middle class schools. The children were asked to explain concrete, interactive, and abstract concepts to an imaginary creature (a puppet). For half the items, an initial period of…

Ability to reason clearly and efficiently is perhaps the single most important learning objective common to all subjects and to all aspects of the schooling situation. In order to design an effective reading comprehension program, teachers and program planners must assess children's logical abilities. This discussion provides a review of some of…

Proposes five generalizations on existing knowledge, learning, and their interaction, and discusses evidence for these from recent research on children's learning, memory, conceptual understanding, and problem solving. (Author/AOS)

In order to determine the cognitive development of Navajo children in terms of Piagetian conservation of number, mass, and continuous quantity, 168 Navajo children at seven different age levels from 5 to adult were presented with a series of three conservation tasks. The tasks consisted of a standard object and an equivalent object that could be…