Forty-five children, ages nine through eleven, were divided into control group and experimental groups that read or wrote hunches concerning a discrepant event involving sliding blocks. Those who generated hunches were shown to learn more in subsequent inquiry behaviors designed to explain the discrepant event. (MLH)

Describes science activities for home in terms of sociological theory to understand activities in the home. Demonstrates the existence of differences that cannot fail to affect children's learning in both home and school situations. Illustrates a variation in attitude affecting children as they daily cross boundaries from one culture to another,…

Investigated were relationships between student self perception and actual classroom behavior in problem solving situations of 201 elementary students. Results indicated students with positive self concept were more independent from teachers and peers. Dependance upon others by low self esteem students is more evident in higher grades. (SL)

Measured children's (n=182) competence at syllogistic reasoning and in solving a series of problems requiring inductive reasoning. Reports that syllogistic reasoning and inductive reasoning were significantly correlated with both simultaneous and successive synthesis. Provides a basis for understanding the roles of spatial and verbal-logical…

Found that the following variables significantly affected the students' performance of a task involving science skills: type of rule and number of attributes used in the prediction task, and whether the student was given a verbal description of the rule to be used. (MLH)

Ten-year-old students (n=531) from the U.S. and Germany were studied to determine the relationships between everyday experience, domain-specific control beliefs, acquisition of science knowledge, and solving of everyday technical problems. A causal model, developed and tested through structural equation modeling, showed that domain-specific…

Three research questions are explored relating the psychological phenomenon of premature closure to (1) age, (2) Piagetian developmental level, and (3) ability to generate hypothetico-deductive strategies. Children (N=141) in grades 1-6 were interviewed and administered light-and-button tasks to describe these relationships. (CS)

Female education majors in a physical science course were given a set of tasks analogous to a given, solved prototype-task to investigate how transfer items were handled. Also used a conceptual model along with the solved prototype and a general procedure for applying the conceptual model to the transfer items. (Author/JN)

An instructional program based on expert-novice differences in experimental problem-solving performance was taught to grade six students (N=265). Performance was assessed with multiple-choice and open-ended measures of specific transfer. Between-group comparisons using pretest scores as covariate showed treatment condition students consistently…

Reviews the neural modeling principles of learning, perception, cognition, and motor control, discusses their applications to sensory-motor problem solving, and explores possible relationships between that pattern of problem solving and aspects of higher order formal operational problem solving. Cites implications for science education. (ML)

Examines some of the problems in interpreting data from attitude measures when the dimensionality of the instrument and sources of heterogeneity in the population are ignored. Illustrates this point by describing the development of an instrument designed to measure children's attitude toward science-related activities. (TW)

The question of how children solve force and motion problems in computer simulations without explicit knowledge of the underlying physics was investigated. Keystroke sequences made by children were saved and analyzed, and children were interviewed to understand their perception of the relationship between keyboard input and on-screen action. (CW)

Describes a qualitative study that explores students' perceptions of their own learning. Document review, participant observation, and open-ended interviews were used to gather and triangulate data. Factors that were perceived as helpful were woven into a theoretical model. The uses of the model are discussed. (Author/KR)

Reports on a study intended to determine the science education research interests of elementary teachers and to examine the data according to certain demographic variables. Results indicate that hands-on experience, science content, cognitive development and learning styles, problem solving, and teaching strategies were the top five research…

Examines the use of clinical interviews as a complement to more typical achievement tests. The research focused on the learning outcomes resulting from second grade students' viewing of television program on magnets. Results indicated that clinical interviews provided evidence of effective instruction when achievement tests did not. (ML)