Children's understanding of the epistemological terms "know" and "guess" was investigated in two studies with four- to ten-year-old subjects. Two adult players guessed at the location of a ball hidden in one of two boxes. On each trial the child was asked questions about "knowing" and "guessing" both before and after the guessing took place.…

The formal operations skills and problem solving performance of 60 gifted girls (grades 4 through 6) were investigated. Ss were given Piagetian tasks which involved conservation of mass and weight, use of proportion, oscillation of the pendulum, and projection of shadows. Among findings were the following: (1) no relationship between IQ and either…

The problems with using Piagetian theory to explore language-thought relationships are two-fold. First there are methodological problems, including the lack of experimental controls and the lack of uniform criteria by which cognitive operations are identified. A second difficulty is the questionable practice of interpreting child language…

Types and amount of private speech (aloud talking which is not addressed to another person) were assessed during the free play of 16 hyperactive and 16 non-hyperactive boys (6-10 years old). Verbalizations were coded into nine categories which denoted the boys' level of use of verbal control of their own behavior. Differences in amount and type of…

Determined was the effect of a community college education on cognitive development of 28 laboratory technology students and 29 liberal arts students. The students were pretested and posttested at the beginning and end of the year, respectively, in two areas of cognitive development: combinatorial logic and proportional logic. For the pretests,…

Science teachers participating in a seminar were asked to respond to the following question: "Based on your teaching experiences, what kinds of research related to classroom teaching practices would you like to see done?" The responses were classified into 12 logical factors by a panel of reviewers, and ranked according to frequency of response.…

This study presents evidence to substantiate the hypothesis that an important relationship exists between prior knowledge and resulting cognitive structure subsequent to instruction; and thus that relevant existing cognitive structure is an important variable affecting learning. The subjects were 126 first-grade students. Relevant existing…

Children three through six years of age were asked to imitate actions depicted in photographs to determine whether they could interpret information of action in photographs. Twenty children at each of four age levels, 3, 4, 5, and 6 years, were asked to imitate two photos, each showing a young child performing a physical action. Following this…

A model basic speech communication course is described in this paper, along with guidelines for developing and maintaining a cognitive-basic skills approach to such a course. The course outline describes the university environment where the course is taught; the structure of the department offering the course; the philosophy and course objectives;…

Piaget's research on the processes and products of cognitive and representational development in early childhood is employed to outline the bases of early language development. The processes of assimilation and accommodation, leading to horizontal decalage; empirical and reflective abstraction, resulting in schemas and schemes; as well as…

This paper suggests that language study focus its attention more on the pedagogical needs of educators by offering them a more comprehensive dialectical and unifying theory of language development that could then present the process as a holistic endeavor instead of as a set of separate linguistic acquisitions. Specifically, it suggests the use…

This monograph was designed to evaluate current research in the middle school area and to assess the state of this research and its impact on practitioners. The lead article concerns the status of middle school research. It offers a discussion of flaws in much of past research, including problems of inconclusive results, low technical quality,…

A QUALITATIVE AND CLINICAL ANALYSIS OF COGNITIVE FUNCTIONING WAS DETERMINED BY ADMINISTRATION OF THE STANDFORD-BINET INTELLIGENCE SCALE AND THE WECHSLER INTELLIGENCE SCALE FOR CHILDREN TO A SAMPLE OF 65 NORMAL CHILDREN. EXAMINATIONS AND OBSERVATIONS WERE MADE FOR EACH CHILD DURING HIS INFANCY, PRESCHOOL, LATENCY, AND PREPUBERTY PERIODS. ANALYSIS…

A brief summary of research findings which support the hypothesis of scriptal knowledge structures in children and which indicates that children use such structures in ways very similar to those of adults is provided in this paper. Research reveals that when children as young as three are asked to tell what they know about events, they tend to…

Since psycholinguistic research suggests that readers ascribe meaning by sampling grapho-phonemic, syntactic, and semantic text features, a study was conducted to investigate which cue strategies readers of different abilities utilized, and whether these strategies were mediated by levels of cognitive development. The subjects were 50 second grade…