Children ages 3 to 5 years old are observed in a series of 3 experiments assessing their use of counterfactual thinking in causal reasoning. Results suggest that young children readily interpret the cause of an outcome in terms of a contrast between the observed sequence of events, and a counterfactual alternative in which the outcome did not…

Investigated development of reasoning about the teaching of values in school and family contexts among 8-, 10-, and 13-year olds and college students. Found that children and young adults' reasoning is multifaceted and distinguishes between moral values that reflect justice, rights, and moral character traits and other forms of desirable…

Analyzes the concept of teaching from various aspects. Reviews research on students' conceptions of natural phenomena, conceptual change, and teacher thinking. Suggests an appropriate conception of teaching science. (YP)

Four experiments investigated children's ability to notice and remember events in which the acquisition of factual information occurs. Results indicated that children tend to report they have known newly learned information for a long time, suggesting that children have some understanding of knowledge acquisition, but not at the level of adults.…

Examined the nature of perceptual classification in children and young adults. Found that most children attend selectively to one stimulus dimension when making perceptual classification judgments. Suggests that this developmental trend does not appear to be a holistic-to-analytic shift but rather a trend toward greater consistency in following a…

Tested Cooper and Fazio's dissonance model. Subjects made arguments that were consistent or inconsistent with their attitudes and were provided feedback about consequences. Attitude-change effect only occurred when behaviors were both inconsistent and resulted in aversive consequences. Results suggest that cognitive inconsistency may be necessary…

Describes an exploratory study on the acquisition and use of knowledge representation skills and structures by sixth-graders, supported by a computer-based learning environment. Results indicated that symbolic structures can be taught successfully, and that students using them in the context of instructional tasks perform at the higher band of…

Explores some speculative hypotheses on states of knowing and learning, and how these states and processes might be applied to artificial intelligence and expert systems development. (JKP)

Two experiments investigated perceptual primacy of dimensional and similarity relations in stimulus classification of mentally retarded children. Results support a distinction between separable and integral stimulus structures, but do not support an integral-to-separable shift in perceptual development. Results suggest implications for…

Examined the effects of perceived control and close alternative outcomes on counterfactual generation (thoughts of what could have been). Subjects played a "wheel of fortune" game in which they controlled one of two wheels. Results supported the idea that people generate counterfactuals about events over which they have perceived…

Examined impact of outcome controllability on counterfactual thoughts (thoughts of what could have been). Two studies showed that outcome controllability affected counterfactual direction: thoughts on how things could have been better were more frequent following controllable outcomes, and thoughts on how things could have been worse followed…

Didactic transposition theory asserts that bodies of knowledge are designed not to be taught but to be used. Discusses didactic transposition, the transposition of knowledge regarded as a tool to be used to knowledge as something to be learned in mathematics textbooks. (14 references) (MDH)

Addressed three issues in a description of techniques used to study how people learn structured sequences. These are the content of what is learned, the role of conscious awareness in syntactic learning, and the role of limited-capacity processing or focal attention in syntactic learning. (Contains 86 references.) (Author)

Reviews research indicating that students' cognitive models hold random events to be equiprobable Examined 87 students between the ages of 15 and 17 to determine whether masking a random event using geometric figures would affect the students' view of the event as equiprobable. Results indicated that masking overcame the equiprobable bias of the…

Considers the relevance of cognitive learning theory to instructional design for effective learning. Highlights include the organization of knowledge; systems approach; cognitive process learning; schema theory; and components of a model for instructional design, including pretesting, motivational considerations, media selection, and validation.…