Explores self-reflection skills and views in the context of an introductory physics course for first-year engineering honors students. Measures students' conceptual learning gains using standard survey instruments. Finds that students with high conceptual gains tend to show reflection on learning that is more articulate and epistemologically…

Reviews current research on children's concepts and categories that reflects a growing consensus that nonperceptual knowledge is central to concepts and determines category membership, whereas perceptual knowledge is peripheral in concepts and only a rough guide to category membership. Argues that there is no compelling basis in theory or in data…

Comments on the article by Jones and Smith in this issue. Responds to the theses that perceptual information is as much at the core of concepts as is nonperceptual information and that concepts are not represented as such but are computed on-line when needed. Presents a view of the relationship between perception and conceptual knowledge…

Comments on the article by Jones and Smith in this issue. Describes a program of research that demonstrates the important influence of perception on the structure of concepts. Proposes that both perceptual and nonperceptual information are important to conceptual structure throughout the continuum of knowledge acquisition and that perception is a…

Comments on the article by Jones and Smith in this issue. Outlines different perspectives from which the issue of conceptual development is approached, elaborating on the functions concepts serve and variations in those functions. Notes points of agreement with the perceptual knowledge view and offers comments on the research supporting the…

Children's use of the middle concept was assessed in two developmental studies. Experiment 1, with kindergarten through fifth-grade students, showed marked improvement in the mastery of the middle concept across elementary grades. In Experiment 2, discrimination pretraining with two nonoverlapping stimulus sets transferred to the novel test…

Examined three- to four-month-old infants' ability to form perceptually based categorical representation in the domains of natural kinds and artifacts. By showing the availability of perceptually driven basic and superordinate-like representations in early infancy that closely correspond to adult conceptual categories, findings underscored the…

Examines current research on brain development, focusing on infants' ability to understand basic numerical concepts and arithmetic operations. Asserts that as the brain undergoes dramatic transformations, it already has a built-in capacity to understand basic numerical concepts. Recommends that parents and professionals engage in activities…

Discussed is the spatial concept model of J. Piaget in terms of the child's development from topological spatial relationships to Euclidean and projective relationships with implications for assessment and remediation of perceptual dysfunction. (DB)

A collaborative research study was designed to facilitate, at the local school level, a mathematics teacher's development of a "constructivist" pedagogy. This paper discusses the nature and influence of the teacher's professional beliefs on his attempts to create a classroom learning environment congruent with the principles of a constructivist…

The major objective of this study was to investigate the relationship between the perceptual preferences of elementary school children and their performance on pictorial model-based tests of selected science concepts. Perceptual preferences for size and shape did not significantly influence performance. Preference for color did appear to be…

The relationship between conceptual complexity and stimulus saliency was explored in a 3 x 4 factorial design using 144 undergraduates. Levels of complexity were represented by varying the ratio of relevant-to-irrelevant dimensions (1:3, 2:2, and 3:1). The saliency factor varied according to the discriminability between each attribute within…

Based on an M.A. thesis (Mitler) submitted to the Department of Psychology, Michigan State University, and reported in part at the meetings of the Midwest Psychological Association (Chicago, May 3, 1968).

A decline exists in children's ability at ages 4 and 5 to accurately respond to the difference between polar adjectives such as "big" and "tall.""Taller" and "bigger" are both taken to mean "having a higher top point," rather than "bigger" meaning "greater overall mass." Two hypotheses are put forth to explain this. The "strong cognitive…

Recent evidence suggests that whereas pictures are more easily recognized, discriminated, associated, and recalled than their corresponding verbal labels, this is not the case in concept acquisition/utilization tasks. If such evidence is interpreted in terms of a "frequency theory" perspective, one would expect the typically obtained…