This pamphlet is designed to help parents care for their children and themselves in ways that foster good mental health. The subject matter presented, death, may also be useful for relatives, school teachers, and babysitters who play important roles in the lives of children. Emphasis is placed on the following areas: (1) awareness of death; (2)…

An original purpose of higher education in the United States was personal development through acculturation to the classics and to moral principles. Other purposes, those of economics, political orientation, and service, have frequently overshadowed that original goal. It may be that higher education institutions have neglected personal…

This curriculum guide, in working paper form, for a semester-long three-credit course in individual and family development is one of nine technical core courses in an associate degree consumer/family manager program. The course studies individual and family development through the life cycle. Emphasis is on the relationship of basic needs to the…

The research described is based on videotapes of 40 toddlers interacting with peers during 10 small playgroup sessions spaced throughout the children's second year of life. The paper outlines the development of an observational system for studying the development of peer relations in toddlers, considers the behavioral forms which characterize peer…

The concepts of cognitive development and objectivity are explored preparatory to a discussion of a suitable theory of development to be used as the foundation for developmentally-based standardized tests. It is hypothesized that Piagetian theory is the most appropriate basis for such tests and two possible approaches for constructing…

The foundations of the cognitive developmental curriculum movement are briefly examined in the paper. The key features of this movement are the recommendations it makes in three areas: curriculum sequencing, curriculum content, and teaching strategies. Each of these areas is critically examined. It is concluded that the grounds for all proposals…

In a pilot study of children's drawings of "a house with a tree behind it," Piagetian sequence (scribbling, fortuitous realism, failed realism, intellectual realism, and visual realism) was tentatively supported. Children's strategies in decentering from intellectual to visual realism were noted. The study reported in this paper was…

In this volume the author first analyses the roots and directions of contemporary social change, and derives a series of questions to which education has to find practical answers and a concept of mental health defined not as adjustment but as dynamic adjustability. In the light of present knowledge of the dynamics of child development, he reviews…

The relationship between level of cognitive functioning at the beginning of first grade and level of reading achievement at the end of first grade was investigated in a sample of 325 children. The EITS Concept Assessment Kit-Conservation was used to classify the children as being in the preconceptual stage, the intuitive stage, or the concrete…

This paper describes two experiments in which children in grades 1, 3, and 5 were given three kinds of spatial perspective-taking problems to solve as quickly as they could: (1) C problems, solvable only by computation (that is, noting which features of a particular object array were closest to another observer in order to estimate how the array…

The results of five studies into the characteristics of wrong answers as a class of divergent behavior are presented. The evidence from these studies, when taken in combination, suggests that the tendency of researchers to ignore wrong answers has been a fundamental procedural error of broad scope and serious consequences. Instead of the straight…

Drawing on results from informal reading inventories and studies of oral reading behavior, a theory is presented to describe the process of learning to read. Reading is seen to be broader than a skill and more like a repertoire with many abilities, aptitudes, and special accomplishments performing in concert. This repertoire is acquired in four…

The cognitive levels of 60 children from grades one, three, and five were compared with their linguistic performance on selected examples of similes and metaphors. Cognitive level was measured using Raven's Colored Progressive Matrices; a new instrument was developed to assess children's linguistic performance. Results indicated a significant…

The author presents a general framework of social studies concepts and inquiry processes to be developed in the middle years, which correlates to primary and secondary offerings and which are appropriate to the developmental stages of students aged 8-13. (SJL)

Research has shown that teachers have difficulty stage scoring moral thought statements based on Kohlberg's moral development theory. This article explores ways of using process evaluation, developed recently by Kohlberg and others, to avoid stage scoring moral judgments within "Kohlbergian" programs. (AV)