Thirteen 4-year olds were asked to arrange dolls in order from largest to smallest. Longitudinal observations over six months revealed five approaches to ordering and four approaches to correction. The "method of extremum" was employed later in development; otherwise, the order in which approaches appeared was highly variable, with many…

Tests children for the effects of prior knowledge on the amount of learning that occurs after a training period focusing on either number skills or logical operations. No relationship existed between the amount children learned and their pretraining knowledge or the amount learned and their developmental level. (Author/BB)

The antecedents of verbal behavior, together with the teaching skills of the adult linguistic community, probably constitute all the necessary bases for language acquisition. As they seemed to be sufficient for the explanation of all the known phenomena, an assumption of an innate linguistic language acquisition device was rejected as superfluous.…

Examined relationships among theory of mind construct of intention and false belief, problem-solving ability, metacognitive regulation, and strategy use in 39 preschoolers. Found significant correlations between strategy use and theory of mind, and metacognitive regulation and theory of mind. A moderate, but nonsignificant, correlation was found…

Investigates, using eight scenarios, children making inferences about memory from incomplete knowledge and children varying in what they judge as relevant information in their schema. Showed that older children are less likely than younger ones to invoke an inferential schema when making memory judgements. (Author/BB)

Investigated effects of spatial and literacy content on learning through social interaction. Pairs of kindergarten children in three interaction episodes solved spatial and literacy problems. Gains were made in spatial understanding independent of the type of social interaction used. Spatial understanding appeared to be affected more by how…

Studied use of games to teach simple classification and seriation constructs to 3-1/2-year-old children. Found substantial and maintained improvement on classification and seriation. Found that children generalized their new understanding of classification and seriation to different problems, and found that evidence for a more general cognitive…

Forty-eight kindergarten children were divided into four groups on the basis of their status (preoperational vs. transitional) and whether or not they received inversion-negation training. Results indicated no differences due to status, but differences due to training. Results do not confirm the contention that acceleration can only occur during…

The construct of conservation, as presently studied in dichotomous form (i.e., Conservers vs. Nonconservers), may be a convenient fiction, but that is all it is. There seems to be great need to treat this dimension as the continuous variable it really is. (Authors)

This study compared affective responses to written and oral presentations of triadic situations of three groups: fourth graders (concrete operational), eighth graders, and freshmen in college (formal operational) to see whether the variation in stimulus mode produces a different kind of response in the eighth graders. (Author/NH)

Examines the nature of the cognitive coding processes operating both during and following exposure to modeled behavior and the contributions of these processes to recall of the behavior in four- and seven-year-old children. (Author/MP)

The Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking: Verbal Form A were given to 39 fifth-grade children in a rural elementary school and scored for fluency, flexibility, and originality. (Author/MP)

Examined selected problem-solving behaviors of school-age children and their parents in dyadic and triadic contexts. Parent-child interactions revealed sex-of-parent and sex-of-child differences as a function of problem-solving contexts. (Author/BB)