The purposes of this study were twofold: (1) to investigate the effect of movement for several inanimate objects on children's judgments of "aliveness;" and (2) to examine the nature of explanations given by three age groups of children in support of their judgments as to whether animate and inanimate objects were "alive" or…

Jean Piaget's ideas regarding symbolic function are expanded in this paper to provide a model to use in distinguishing between general symbolic versus specific linguistic deficits in language disordered children (whose disorders are not due primarily to intellectual, sensory, motor, or social-emotional deficits). In applying this model to the…

This paper suggests that language study focus its attention more on the pedagogical needs of educators by offering them a more comprehensive dialectical and unifying theory of language development that could then present the process as a holistic endeavor instead of as a set of separate linguistic acquisitions. Specifically, it suggests the use…

The roles that essentially contested concepts play in persuasive discourse are examined in this paper. The first section of the paper reviews W. B. Gallie's original explication of the nature of essentially contested concepts and the body of theoretical literature that has developed in response to it. It then notes three major areas of…

This reports the effects of the number of relevant stimulus dimensions and figural versus verbal stimuli on the concept learning ability of college students. Results force a consideration of mediational variables in explaining this form of cognitive learning. A set of verbal materials analogous to a set of dimensionalized figural materials was…

This investigation examined in the laboratory the type of learning commonly found in the school situation--the formalized acquisition of concepts. A verbal concept-learning task suitable for college students was devised which permitted the externalizing and quantifying of behavior at 6 points in the learning process. A pilot study evaluated the…

The study relates performance on a cognitive-style measure of perceptual sensitivity and grade point averages to several indices of creativity as affected by a checklist procedure and verbal pretraining. Subjects were 76 students, half of which received verbal pretraining requiring them to list adjectives under five categories. The pretrained…

The purpose of this experiment was to provide further information on how an individual's strategy and his performance are affected by increasing the amount of relevant or irrelevant information he receives. The subjects were sixty volunteers from an undergraduate course in educational psychology who were randomly assigned to one of six treatment…

Three experiments were conducted to determine the effectiveness of verbal and imaginal rehearsal strategies in children's discrimination learning. With verbal materials, imaging the referent of the correct item was more facilitative than vocalizing the correct item, as long as the former strategy was defined in a manner conducive to effective…

At its national convention, NCTE questioned whether composition can be taught at all. A synthesis of some recent research and theory offers a new perspective from which to analyze the problem and to propose some solutions to it. It suggests that the composing process can be analyzed into its component skills and that these skills can be taught…

Previous research has shown that sequences in which instances from the same category appear successively facilitate performance in concept attainment. This could be due to subjects adopting strategies which involve comparisons of instances from within the same category. However, if subjects were to adopt a strategy involving comparisons of…

The purpose of thinking is to collect information and to make the best possible use of it. Because of the way the mind works to create fixed concept patterns we cannot make the best use of new information unless we have some means for restructuring the old patterns and bringing them up to date. Our traditional methods of thinking teach us how to…