The paper describes an experiment in which 52 deaf children (7-19 years old) and 36 normal hearing children (7-16 years old) were given several Piagetian conservation tasks to determine if the conventional instructions are the basis for conservation failure in deaf children and to examine the order in which deaf Ss acquired various forms of…

The approaches and methods of teaching and learning social studies are examined. Fundamental study skills are emphasized: effective questioning techniques, data gathering, ability to recognize relationships in terms of time and space, and ability to recognize facts, opinions, and propaganda. To develop these skills it is recommended that priority…

This study investigated the effects of stimulus presentation rate on primacy-recency effects in children. A modification of the Digit Span task used in the Binet and Wechsler intelligence scales provided the basic memory task administered to 56 male school children in grades kindergarten, second, fourth, and sixth. The specific design required…

In two experiments (N=210) conservers, transitional conservers, and nonconservers were directed to lie or pretend to other children that their judgments and explanations of a series of conservation problems were the opposite of what they really were. Nonconservers and transitional subjects in both studies made large and significant gains in…

Two experiments investigated the role of children's spontaneous conceptual "biases" in pictorial discrimination learning. The results suggested that such biases may serve either to facilitate or to interfere with discrimination learning. Moreover, in each experiment, age by treatment interactions revealed that in comparison to the behavior of…

It was hypothesized that the acquisition of conservation behavior would be facilitated when stimuli were more concrete than abstract. Eighty white second graders were randomly assigned to four groups and presented with three conservation-of-weight problems. Clay balls and the conservation transformations were either shown, demonstrated, and…

The author developed three instruments which operationally defined certain probability concepts and combinatorial abilities and subsequently used the instruments to classify the 90 subjects of the study according to their conceptual strategies or ability levels. The subjects were high school biology students from one school; all were taught by the…

Investigated was the assumption that college students are fully capable, by the time they enter college, of operating at the level of formal thought. The subjects selected for this study were students in chemistry and physics courses at a state university and an inner-city community college. Each student was tested with a Piegetian task to…

A study was conducted to examine the situational generality of extended learning in early infancy. Ss were 17 infants within one week of eight weeks of age. All but two were Caucasian, and all were from middle-income families. The apparatus consisted of a pressure sensing pillow which, when placed under the infant's head or feet, was sensitive to…

Kindergarten and first grade children were given a paired-associate learning task following one of five types of strategy-training procedures. In the motor training conditions, subjects generated interactions involving pairs of toys by playing with them or by drawing pictures of them. It was found that relative to simple imagery practice, motor…

In this essay, research done on concept learning is discussed. The study analyzes concept learning as one form of learning, formulating guidelines for teaching concepts, and describes the abilities underlying the attainment of concepts. An analytical model is presented; various operations such as concrete concepts and identity concepts are…

The purpose of this project was to develop new information and analyses that would contribute to development of a systematic understanding of cognitive structure, including its acquisition and utilization during problem solving. Experimental and theoretical work was done on three specific problems. (1) Studies of individual differences and effects…

A model for sequencing intellectual skills through the use of learning hierarchies is provided. Applications of this model to social studies education are included. (DE)

Describes children's reactions to chance and probability in a variety of experimental situations, using four different experiments from Piaget's work, to give a clearer picture of how children approach these ideas. (GA)

This article examines the relationship between learning and divergent production, and describes implications for the development of academic abilities. (Author/AM)