Previous research by Maratsos found that 3-year-olds were more accurate than four and 5-year-olds in selecting 'big' rectangles or animals when choosing between pairs of stimuli. A study then investigated the nature of the previous experiments themselves, particularly the procedures the researcher followed and the possible inferences which he drew…

A bibliography on Black Americans contains over 450 citations of articles, papers, monographs, and books in seven categories: culture (language and customs); normal speech and language acquisition (theoretical framework, mother-child interaction, language community, form, content, usage, cognitive development); sociolinguistics (issues, dialect…

This paper outlines seven assumptions about teaching conditions that best facilitate critical thinking in the undergraduate psychology curriculum; the main ideas proposed in a model of critical thinking developed by a network of psychologists across the nation; and the application of this critical thinking model to the undergraduate curriculum.…

Examined in a longitudinal study of children were correspondences and correlations between early language development on the one hand, and the manipulation of objects and play development on the other. There were developmental correspondences between the onset of five language landmarks (the emergence of first word, referential word, demonstrative…

A series of studies was conducted over a three-year period to determine whether the teaching technique developed in the 1960s called "inquiry training" is effective for teaching problem-solving, thinking, and/or decision-making skills. (Inquiry training is a process in which students are provided with a puzzling situation, are given the…

Perspectives on holistic education, which encompasses a comprehensive view of the student and concern with the totality of factors that affect the student's education and life, are considered. Based on the view that there is an intimate link between cognitive and affective development, the holistic approach advocates that educational institutions…

Because of their egocentricity, many students have a limited sense of other cultures and are caught up in a web of ethnocentric biases without quite knowing how and why these biases exist. A framework, encompassing the theories of J. Moffett and J. Piaget, may be designed to move students through a series of hierarchical writing exercises that…

This is the second in a series of six units for administrators and teachers to serve the Environmental Goal, one of Pennsylvania's Twelve Goals of Quality Education. The environmental goal states that quality education should help every student acquire the knowledge and attitudes necessary to maintain the quality of life in a balanced environment.…

Unproven beliefs about the process of reading and its instruction and about the effects of maturation and social structure on learning have obscured the question of what children know about how to read. An alternate conceptualization proposes that to learn to read children must obtain experience in three reading contexts: the use of print and its…

An overview of preschool education in Lagos State, Nigeria, is particularized with findings from a survey of 156 teachers in 25 Nigerian nursery schools. In Nigeria, urbanization has been accompanied by rapid growth in the number of pre-primary institutions. The educational aims of such institutions include both cognitive and social-emotional…

Preferences for asymmetry in the relationship between metaphorical topic and vehicle were investigated among 64 fifth- and seventh-grade boys and girls. Subjects viewed 12 metaphorically related pairs of pictures selected from the Metaphoric Triads Task (MTT) and were told to write a sentence that tells how one picture is like another. Slides of…

This study investigated preschool children's awareness of the nature of pictorial representation and their understanding of their own efforts to depict. Seventy-six subjects participated in drawing sessions held at 2-week intervals throughout the 8-month school year. Children's spontaneous comments during small-group drawing sessions were…

Three experiments using the same overall design were conducted to address problems associated with repeated measurement designs employed to assess retention of information in complex pictures and to assess the developmental course of schemata-guided retention efforts. Forty-eight subjects, ages 6, 10, and 20 years, were shown scenes whose forms…

The effects of both early and late father-absence upon school achievement, cognitive development, and emotional development of 27 Australian males between 9 and 12 years of age were examined. Three groups of boys were evaluated in order to ascertain the effects of paternal deprivation. These groups included children experiencing (1) early…

This document contains final versions of papers that were conference contributions. This second conference, held in September 1978, was attended by 70 participants from 11 countries. Lectures were presented under the following five main sections: (1) Acquisition of Arithmetical Concepts; (2) The Learning of Generalization and Proof; (3)…