These forty conference papers deal with a wide variety of new approaches to the application of developmental theory. The papers represent a cross-section of current research methodology and techniques used to evaluate such traditional Piagetian topics as concrete and formal operations, conservation, classification skills, language development,…

This paper reports two experiments which examined processes involved in children's ability to solve class inclusion problems of the form, "Are there more A' (subclass) or more A (class)?" In the first experiment a total of 216 children in age groups 5, 7 and 9 years were placed in three conditions which were designed to distinguish…

This paper notes a devaluation of children in American society and urges that more attention be paid to the emotional growth of children, who are subject to the same forces that create in adults feelings of powerlessness, attitudes of superficiality and nonreflection, intolerance for delayed gratification, and confusion about self and…

This study investigated the influence of structured children's television programming on prosocial behavior. Subjects were 53 children ages 4-6, from two day care centers. Nine videotapes were produced (three for each of three experimental conditions) differing in their presentation of socially-valued behavior, socially-devalued behavior,…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the development of organizational processes for both verbal and spatial stimulus materials within an information processing framework. Children in grades 2 and 4 and adults were tested for their ability to report letter strings reflecting various orders of approximation to English and various dot…

This paper reports further on the study described in SE 019 717. Correlational data relating success on proportionality tasks to understanding of related concepts and processes are presented. The five correlative tests involve (1) reducing fractions, (2) multiplying fractions, (3) facility with fractions, (4) inverse relations, and (5) more…

The performance of 75 congenitally blind and 75 sighted subjects (6- to 18-years-old) was compared on 32 Piagetian measures of reasoning, moral judgment, and moral conduct. Among major findings were that blind Ss did not achieve the reasoning processes characteristic of concrete operational thought with the facility or completion that would be…

This paper focuses on a study which replicates and extends earlier work employing a recognition memory paradigm to investigate children's memory and developmental changes in dominant word associations. On the recognition test the implicit associative response can lead to better memory for the original items (this is the hit rate), and it can also…

The paper presented relates to a study done examining the ability of children from grades one through six to locate a point in one, two, and three dimensions and to order a temporal series of events in one, two, and three dimensions. The performance of the subjects was also used to examine a small part of Piaget's theory of cognitive development.…

The efficacy of small group instructional programs in classificatory, seriation, and combined class/series skills was evaluated for a sample of 60 urban, middle-class, 4- to 5-year-old children in a transfer of training design. Significant curriculum-specific transfer effects were found for the seriation instructional condition, whereas little…

This paper analyzes Brainerd's work in assessing the developmental sequence or ordination and cardination concepts of number, and describes a study which investigated the hypothesis that task-specific difficulty could explain Brainers's data. Three new tasks were designed for the assessment of ordination and cardination and administered to a…

A study was undertaken of the effects of formal education and conservation of numerousness on addition and subtraction problem types. Thirty-six kindergarten and 36 first-grade subjects randomly selected from one area of a school district were administered measures of conservation, problem-solving success, and modeling ability. Following factor…

The author considers memory as being composed of four categories. The fourth category--metamemory--refers to the individual's knowledge and awareness of memory or of anything pertinent to information storage and retrieval. It is that aspect of memory that deals with the how and what of memory itself. The paper first presents a model of what could…

This study explores the cognitive dimensions used by children in differentiating among television characters. Similarity judgments between all possible pairs of 14 television characters were analyzed using INDSCAL, a multidimensional scaling method which allows for individual or subgroup differences in scaling solutions. By linking the results of…

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether success in the Science - A Process Approach (SAPA) process of classification designed for primary grade children is contingent upon the children's developmental level as defined by Piaget's theory. The investigators sought to determine whether children who had reached the concrete operational…