Designed for Montessori teachers with little background in the plastic arts, this discussion points out that, while the Montessori program has many features that support creative development, presently, no art curriculum exists. The article indicates the limitations of Maria Montessori's ideas and attitudes about the role of art in the education…

A study compared students' ability to read their stories written with invented spellings with their ability to reread their stories rewritten with conventional spellings. Fourteen first graders wrote stories using invented spelling and read the text aloud. The stories were then transcribed into conventional text by an adult and reread by the…

Data drawn from videotapes of children aged 20 to 32 months were analyzed for patterns in the use of various self-reference forms at an age when children rarely refer to others compared to their use at an age when children more regularly refer to others as main participants. First, the distribution of the forms…

Although the stepfamily has become a significant family system in the United States, the amount of empirical research on stepfamily living is limited. The definitions of a stepfamily as any family in which at least one adult is a stepparent is a simple one, yet the issues and dynamics involved in stepfamilies are complex. The structures, roles,…

Different writing voices are linked to early adult developmental issues that are gender-related. Research by Donald Graves has shown that gender affects topic choice in girls' and boys' writing as early as age seven. Adult developmental theories provide frames for looking at the growth potential of writers and locating gender-related issues. The…

Media attention and public concern focused on child sexual abuse in day care have presented early childhood educators with opportunities to educate parents, the public, and the media about child sexual abuse and quality child care. This paper provides information concerning the sexual abuse of children in day care settings. Topics addressed…

The paper reports on a study of the rate of language learning of 12 children aged 2 to 10 with severe to profound bilateral hearing losses. Intended to help deaf children learn spoken language at the same rate as average hearing Ss, the intervention stressed three qualities of linguistic information: (1) clarity, (2) appropriateness, and (3)…

A study of children's ability to conserve gender identity was made to: (1) investigate whether constancy would be achieved according to the developmental sequence proposed by Kohlberg (1965) and found in subsequent studies; (2) see if the pattern of conservation of referent-type followed the same sequence found in previous studies; (3) assess age…

This paper describes the process of investigating a teacher's knowledge and pedagogical philosophy through using a biographical rendition of a teacher's knowledge grounded in a construction of present teaching practice, based on ethnographic data. A case study is presented demonstrating how a major component of one teacher's present knowledge of…

This study investigated the use of the developmental level of kindergarten children's art work as a predictor of readiness for first grade. The sample consisted of 55 children (33 girls and 22 boys) in three kindergarten classes. All were over 5 years of age and had not attended kindergarten before. The kindergarten screening measure used a…

Focusing on appropriate methods and criteria for identifying giftedness in elementary visual arts students, the study consists primarily of an annotated bibliography divided into three sections: childhood visual art development (9 entries); selected identification procedures and instruments (25 entries); and identification techniques in the…

The purpose of this paper is to review and synthesize the literature on adult development and to suggest how this information can be applied to the practice of adult education. The first section discusses the nature of adult development, its definition, and key concepts. Sequential patterns of change in adulthood are examined in section 2,…

The relationship between symbolic play and early language was studied in 40 girls and 39 boys between 12 and 24 months of age. Subjects were individually tested during two or three sessions by a female experimenter in a day care center in Jyvaskyla, Finland. Children's symbolic play level was assessed according to a developmental structure of five…

This study attempted to search for a learning hierarchy among the skills comprising formal operations and the integrated science processes. Data were obtained from two instruments administered to 741 high school science students. The Group Assessment of Logical Thinking (GALT) measured performance on six Piagetian cognitive modes: controlling…

A total of 83 children of 27 to 63 months of age were interviewed in an effort to assess the importance of the children's understanding of gender constancy and their use of physical characteristics in making gender role stereotype attributions. It was hypothesized that young children would use stimulus models' sex to a greater extent than the…