Two experiments were conducted to investigate children's understanding of the relationship of narrators to the texts they narrate and how children's developing cognitive abilities influence that understanding. The subjects, 164 children aged 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, and 10, heard a series of short passages containing several characters, one of whom was the…

The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of a preservice science methods course emphasizing the mastery of selected science process skills on the level of development of logical thinking of students majoring in elementary school education. The problem was investigated for one semester with experimental subjects in their junior year,…

Subjective engagement and cognitive skills are important for various aspects of writing skills. For the work of writing to be efficient, the student must be able to function in both a rhetorical and productive situation, defined in terms of subject, function, and audience. The processes of writing--defined as planning, translating, and reviewing…

The concept of metacognition involves two processes: an awareness of certain skills--strategies and resources that are needed to perform a task effectively--and the ability to use self-regulatory mechanisms to ensure the successful completion of the given task. A review of the literature suggests that (1) metacognitive development differs among…

The development of social cognitions about classroom life and their potential influence on children's classroom behavior were studied. Each of 360 first and fifth grade children from schools in middle class and working class neighborhoods were interviewed using booklets illustrating classroom behavior. The results indicated that children do…

Abstracts and comments are presented for 11 studies. There are two each on aspects of problem solving, mathematics achievement, and estimation. The remainder cover topics related to cognitive development, cognitive processes, evaluation, numeration, and student errors. Research as reported in RIE and CIJE between July and September 1982 is also…

This document primarily consists of papers scheduled for presentation at the third annual meeting of the North American chapter of the International Group for Psychology in Mathematics Education (NA-PME), held in September 1981, at the University of Minnesota. A total of 27 papers are arranged alphabetically by author. An additional three late…

A Center for the Study of Learning has been proposed by the National Institute of Education. This center is to examine a broad spectrum of higher order cognitive skills including the nature, acquisition, and instruction of these skills. The International Consortium for Learning Research and its coordinating institute, The Ohio State University,…

Drawing on the exam responses from a graduate teacher education course, this paper analyzes four general difficulties teachers have in implementing inductive teaching methods. Based on Piaget's model of how children learn, inductive teaching is an instructional methodology that begins with concrete instances of a concept, and encourages learners…

This report discusses the cognitive-skills approach to teaching. This approach makes explicit the mental activities engaged in by successful thinkers as they solve problems and master ideas, and it attempts to teach these "high aptitude" thinking activities to "low-aptitude" students. The report begins by illustrating and contrasting high- and…

The reasoning ability of 20 ninth grade, 20 eleventh grade, and 15 college freshman boys was explored. Three tasks in reasoning were given each student. In the "turtles task" the student was asked to test a hypothesis; from his responses the investigator determined whether the student tested the hypothesis by trying to find confirming instance or,…

Presented are materials related to the work of the Number and Measure and Rational Numbers working group of the Georgia Center for the Study of the Learning and Teaching of Mathematics. Much of the content reports on attempts to bring constructs from developmental psychology and mathematics to bear in understanding children's ideas of number and…

The study involving 60 learning disabled (LD) and 30 normal achieving seventh through ninth graders was designed to identify adolescents homogeneously defined as exhibiting a "specific learning disability in arithmetic" and to determine if the cognitive processes (visual-spatial, visual-reasoning, and visual-memory) are related to the academic…

Reporting on the development, design, and implementation of an approach for teaching reading to rural black children in the intermediate grades, this paper is organized in three sections that reflect the framework of the project. The first section discusses the delineation of the theoretical framework for teaching reading, resulting in a rationale…

Eighty-two children (ages 4.4 to 6.5 years) were administered a Backward Digit Span test to measure M-space and four conservation tasks (number, substance, continuous quantity, and weight). Based upon a neo-Piagetian theory of intellectual development proposed by Pascual-Leone (1969), two hypotheses were tested: (1) A significant relation should…