Children in grades 1, 3, and 5 and college students were given a variety of judgment tasks contrasting the comparison of quantity with the comparison of proportions to determine whether the understanding of proportions develops before formal operations. Results indicated that the comprehension of abstract relations requires formal operations.…

Research supported by a grant form the U.S. Office of Education, Bureau of Research

The author describes a Piaget based curriculum involving three main themes (classification, number measurement/space, and seriation) for young mentally retarded children. Students solve problems by doing something physically and mentally to the data, shuffling the facts about in their minds, so that they will come to a logical solution. Language…

This study examines the development of children's concepts of illness in light of Piagetian findings regarding the ontogenesis of causal relations. The Concept of Illness protocol was administered to 72 3-, 7-, and 11-year-old children; 24 from each age group. Children were interviewed individually in a school setting. Raters assigned subjects'…

This review of research, developed in cooperation with the National Association for Research in Science Teaching, was designed to analyze and synthesize the research related to developmental psychology and its relationship to science education. The review is divided into five parts: (1) Introduction; (2) Historical Precedents of the Developmental…

MANY STUDIES HAVE INDICATED THE PRESENCE OF A SLUMP OR INVERSION IN THE PROBLEM-SOLVING EFFICIENCY OF CHILDREN AT THE FOURTH GRADE LEVEL. IT HAS BEEN SUGGESTED THAT THIS MAY BE DUE TO THE INTERFERING EFFECT OF THE FORMATION OF COMPLEX HYPOTHESES BY THE CHILDREN. SINCE A TENDENCY TO RESPOND RAPIDLY WOULD PRESUMABLY INHIBIT THE FORMATION OF COMPLEX…

This paper summarizes what the author considers to be the best advice available at this time for applying Piaget's theory in the chemistry classroom to understand the difficulties that some students have. The identification of students who are operating at the concrete operational or formal operational level is discussed along with the actual…

The concepts of front, back, and side may be easily understood in relation to an intrinsically fronted item, but with a nonfronted object they depend on situational or psychological cues. A study investigated a child's awareness of the front, back, and side of his own body and of fronted and nonfronted objects. Researchers hypothesized that a…

This paper reports two experiments which examined processes involved in children's ability to solve class inclusion problems of the form, "Are there more A' (subclass) or more A (class)?" In the first experiment a total of 216 children in age groups 5, 7 and 9 years were placed in three conditions which were designed to distinguish…

The paper presented relates to a study done examining the ability of children from grades one through six to locate a point in one, two, and three dimensions and to order a temporal series of events in one, two, and three dimensions. The performance of the subjects was also used to examine a small part of Piaget's theory of cognitive development.…

A study was designed to investigate the relationship between cognitive style and hypothesis testing strategies used in solving concept attainment problems. A field-independent (FI) and field-dependent (FD) cognitive style group of third grade students were administered concept attainment problems using a blank-trial methodology. The results…

Three extrinsic factors were manipulated in a problem-solving task performed by 80 ten-year-old children of I Q 90-110. The factors were: the presence or absence of the name of the concept given in feedback, specific instructions, and whether the child was allowed to verbalize. The task was a modification of Vygotsky's experiment on concept…

In order to gather data bearing on the effects of individual differences of the "invariant stages" assumption of cognitive-developmental theory, 270 black, Chinese, and white subjects from 5th, 7th, and ninth grades were administered a new, 25-item, spatial reasoning task. It was predicted that age, ethnic group, and sex would…

Reported is a study to determine if amplifying elementary reading material through the use of exemplars (based on Ausubel's theory of meaningful verbal learning) would reduce conceptual difficulty and thereby increase reading comprehension. Reading passages were developed for three different elementary science concepts with three levels of…

Presented is the curriculum theory designed for 400 gifted boys and girls, from rising junior and senior classes in high school, who attend the 8-week summer Governor's School (GS) of North Carolina. The main aim of the GS is given to be inspiring and guiding future leaders by providing opportunities for special aptitude, general conceptual, and…