Writing readiness is defined in this paper as the skills and understandings necessary for minimum success in completing a writing task. The skills discussed are divided into three areas of need: to give students a clear, operational concept of the function and structure of composition that includes the concepts of paragraphs, sentences,…

The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between student conceptual level and attitudes toward four methods course components: theory, content, method, and experience working with children. Research findings have indicated that a match between student conceptual level and course instructional mode result in significant…

A sequence of reasoning processes based on a combination of theories developed by Jean Piaget is presented. An applied theory of concept-teaching is derived from the restructuring of Piagetian theories on logical thought specifically concerned with the notions of the additive and multiplicative ordering of groups, and the four logic processes of…

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of age differences and differences in memory load on concept identification (CI) tasks of varying levels of complexity. Previous studies with young children found increasingly better performance on CI tasks with increasing age. This was in part due to the fact that older subjects categorize…

The literature suggests a "concrete" to "abstract" hierarchy in concept acquisition. However, typical tests do not reflect this hierarchy. Studies have been reported in which an "abstract" option for an item was included in with a "concrete" option and with distractors. This procedure assumes that "abstract" and "concrete" behavior is on a common…

Territorial decentration is a question of major significance to geographic educators. This paper reports the findings of a research project designed to determine the territorial decentration of an American sample of children. The primary purpose of the research was to determine if Piaget's territorial decentration stages are appropriate for…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between conservation status and relational terms by means of the semantic differential. Sixty-one children classified according to Piaget's three levels of conservation development judged the relational terms "more" and "less" on concrete semantic differential…

An analysis of the quantitative processes underlying conservation of quantity is presented. Models of three quantitative operators--subitizing, counting, and estimation--are derived from adult performance in quantification tasks, and some features of the operators are described. The emergence of conservation is described in terms of the…

The growth of spatial awareness and representation was studied in children between ages five and nine. A group of thirteen tasks was administered to subjects three times with periods of approximately six months among sessions. The tasks were selected to measure understanding of projective spatial properties (straight line trajectories,…

The present experiment compared direct and vicarious transfer in the attainment of affirmative and relational concepts. Second and third grade children were randomly paired as model and observer. The latter observed his yoked model solve the initial two-dimensional problem before solving the intrarule transfer task himself. No differences in…

A study was conducted to clarify a number of issues related to Piaget's theory of invariant sequantiality in child cognitive development. Ss were 143 middle-class white children of bright, average and retarded psychometric abilities (measured by performance on the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test). Bright and average Ss were chronologically aged…

This document is an English-language abstract (approximately 1,500 words) of a book in which the author sums up her research on the problem of training and transfering various types of mental activity. The second part of the book deals with one of the most important problems of mental development, that of the evidences and conditions of…

A model for the analysis of simple human conceptual behavior, based on the apparent similarities of human conceptual behavior and that of infrahuman subjects, is developed. A minimum definition of conceptual behavior is given: A single response, verbal or nonverbal, under the discriminative control of a group of stimuli whose parameters are…

This paper describes two experiments in which children in grades 1, 3, and 5 were given three kinds of spatial perspective-taking problems to solve as quickly as they could: (1) C problems, solvable only by computation (that is, noting which features of a particular object array were closest to another observer in order to estimate how the array…

Primary school children at different stages of acquisition of conservation pretended that their judgments on a series of conservation problems were the opposite of their actual beliefs. The nonconservers and transitional conservers made significant gains in conservation, while the conservers did not regress. Cognitive dissonance training is…