One of the missions of education is to prepare children for complex tasks that occur in their cultural environment. By means of abstracting, the effects of this complexity can be reduced. Recent research and theoretical development show us that young children already seem to be able to think abstractly. The acknowledgement of this potential in…

Depression has been linked to cognitive deficits and learned helplessness models in various theories. To examine depression effects on abstract problem solving ability and the relationship between intelligence and anxiety, 66 of 303 college students (23 male, 43 female), evidencing least and most depressed states as assessed by the Beck Depression…

Studies exploring the transition from early to middle adolescence have found a significant increase in formal-operational thinking, but it is questionable whether the typical adolescent is capable of consistently applying formal operational logic. To examine the relationship between Piagetian-based training techniques and formal-operational…

Author attempted to outline a concept of logic that involves standards of correct reasoning as well as some idea of how these might be carried out in a classroom. (Author/RK)

In teaching symbolic logic to students not majoring in mathematics, one can appeal to simple arithmetic examples, set theory examples, and the use of conjunction and disjunction as aids in presenting the conditional. (SD)

Tasks administered to sixty females 60-120 months of age show that it is possible to test for Piagetian logic by using problems structured in a social context and also suggest that the order of acquisition of logical operations with social stimuli is consistent with the order which has been established with the use of physical stimuli. (Author/CS)

Employed regression analysis to determine the association between multiplicative classification and inductive reasoning. Subjects were 103 fourth grade children. (SDH)

The study examined the relationship between language and mathematics with 11 classes of deaf students taking Algebra 1 or Algebra 2 at the Gallaudet University School of Preparatory Studies. Specifically, the study attempted to predict the difficulty of a variety of relatively simple algebra problems based on the abstractness of the math and the…

This document describes the implementation of a practicum intervention designed to improve the analytic abilities of academically above-average fifth and sixth graders in a class that emphasized academic excellence. When students were tested on the development of complex thinking abilities, several areas needing improvement were identified. A…

Students and instructors may be frustrated with students' lack of understanding of sociological concepts. We suggest that the difficulty of teaching and learning sociology is that sociological concepts and relationships require the use of abstract reasoning patterns. Many students are unaccustomed to using these abstract reasoning patterns. We use…

A pilot study investigated the conceptual level of hearing-impaired preservice teachers as they experienced practicum work with hearing pupils. Eight hearing-impaired student teachers from the Gallaudet College undergraduate teacher education program were videotaped on two different occasions as they taught hearing pupils in public schools during…

The effect of verbal contextual information on junior high school students' categorization of differences among photographic art was examined. Photographs of varying levels of abstraction were presented to the viewers both with and without correct and erroneous titles that referred to descriptive or interpretive information. Twelve students…

A survey of undergraduate education methods texts indicates that students are repeatedly exposed to the theories of Jean Piaget, with an emphasis on the stages of development and characteristics of preschool children. The suggestion is made that an evaluation should be undertaken of misconceptions that undergraduate students might develop as a…

This study compared the performance of 51 gifted Caucasian children on the Stanford Binet LM and the Stanford Binet Fourth Edition (SB4) to determine whether significantly different scores would be obtained. The 33 male and 18 female subjects were from middle and upper-middle class families in a western urban area. Their developmental histories,…