Forty-four second grade students participated in a study examining the relationships between field dependence/independence (FDI), grammatical awareness, reading ability, and training in grammatical awareness. After the children were pretested for their levels of cognitive development, degree of field independence, grammatical awareness, and…

Among the characteristics of communicative apprehensive individuals are fearful reactions to communication situations, perceptions of low personal competency, an inability to identify appropriate social behaviors, and an anticipation of negative outcomes to interaction. One proposed model for communication apprehension assumes that a state of…

Cognitive performance on "An Inventory of Piaget's Developmental Tasks" (IPDT) was related to the Scholastic Aptitude Tests and performance in both college chemistry lecture and laboratory classes. The IPDT is a valid and reliable 72-item, untimed, multiple-choice paper and pencil inventory with 19 subscales representing different…

The proposal outlines a study to assess the role of computers in assessing and instructing students with severe cerebral palsy in spatial and communication skills. The computer's capacity to make learning interesting and challenging to the severely disabled student is noted, along with its use as a diagnostic tool. Implications for theories on…

Recent research on human memory and cognition with particular emphasis on research that might have some promise for mathematics education is reviewed. The focus is on techniques for analyzing the mind in two areas: (1) the architecture of the human memory system, using the information processing model; and (2) the content and structure of…

Freshman composition students have difficulties in moving to new stages of cognitive ability similar to the difficulties experienced by poorer writers in moving to new levels of syntactic maturity. A model of moral/cognitive development created by Lawrence Kohlberg indicates that human responses to moral choices move through as many as six stages…

Cognitive development as it progresses from concrete to abstract thinking is discussed as it relates to adolescent youth and the early secondary curriculum. Piagetian tests administered to a group of freshman and sophomore high school students revealed that many had difficulty with those scholastic activities requiring formal reasoning. Three…

The influence of age, sex, representational detail of objects (prototypicality) and adult play suggestions on children's progression of pretend behaviors was studied. A checklist was developed and utilized for coding the responses of 20 children (10 males, 10 females), to objects judged to be high and low prototypical by 12 adults. Children ranged…

A total of 141 children, aged 6 to 10 years, were read eight illustrated attribution problems involving play and non-play behaviors and were asked to infer information concerning the story character's intrinsic or extrinsic motivation for the behaviors. Children were grouped into three age levels (mean ages 5.9, 8.8 and 10.3 years) for analysis of…

This study examines the development of children's preference for task difficulty levels. Subjects were 78 boys and 66 girls, aged 63 to 105 months. The sample was separated into older and younger groups. Within each age group, half the children of each sex were randomly assigned to one of two forms to test their level of aspiration. Subjects were…

This report suggests that research in education, as well as the design of instruction, can be importantly influenced by the paradigm that guides the work. The application of a paradigm to educational research is illustrated, and two paradigms (reception learning and discovery learning) are contrasted. Finally, it is suggested that all educational…

One approach to preparing kindergarten children for beginning reading combines a meaningful print environment with active student involvement in the learning process. The environment of the classroom from the beginning exposes children to meaningful printed words and symbols. Children use name tags not only for identification but also as a way for…

"Subtractive" bilingualism in Northern Belize is analyzed based on an extension of a model by Wallace Lambert. The impact of English language instruction on Spanish speaking children in Corozal Town, the northernmost urban center in the British colony of Belize, Central America, is described. This description extends an earlier account…

This is one of a series that is a collection of translations from the extensive Soviet literature of the past 25 years on research in the psychology of mathematics instruction. It also includes works on methods of teaching mathematics directly influenced by the psychological research. Selected papers and books considered to be of value to the…

The purpose of this study was to design a unit on percent for adult remedial students based on the principles of Piaget's theory and to evaluate the effectiveness of the unit as a means of improving one characteristic of formal operations, the ability to use porportion. The subjects consisted of 89 undergraduate remedial mathematics students at a…