This booklet examines teachers' professional development from the standpoint of several recent reform reports, particularly the concept of the career ladder. A critique of this model serves as a reference point for an alternative approach to professional development called the "Career Lattice Model". This individualized model for growth…

A category system for organizing six thinking skills and methods for teaching these skills, using the concept of time, are provided. Representing a proposed sequential order of development, the six thinking skills are: (1) imaging--the creating of an internal mental representation of an external thing and the labeling of that representation, (2)…

Empathy, a basis for altruistic motivation, is viewed as a developmental process by Hoffman and others. Current measures of empathy, such as the Davis Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI), have been analyzed by exploratory factor analytic methods which do not allow for the testing of a developmental model of the simplex form. This study was…

The goal of this research synthesis is to evaluate the validity of the claim that there are fundamental limitations on the ability of adolescents to engage in critical thinking. Critical thinking is defined as an analytic, focused cognitive activity aimed at understanding phenomena at a root rather than a superficial level; a type of thinking…

It is hypothesized that graphic skills among the general U.S. population level off at puberty. Examined were the characteristics of 357 pairs of pencil drawings of human figures (one man and one woman) made by male and female adolescents (eighth graders), nonartistic adults (university elementary education majors), and artistic adults (beginning…

A study was conducted to test an hypothesis relating semantic structures to cognitive development, specifically that the mean number of associative complexes used by a group of children will be significantly greater than the mean number of associative complexes used by a group of adolescents. The word game "Password" provided a simulation of a…

To investigate developmental differences, preschoolers' performance on four tasks frequently used to measure their understanding of causal and temporal relationships was studied. Based on an analysis of cognitive processes involved in recognition, completion, construction/seriation, and verbal explanation tasks, the prediction was made that…

The Teenage Health Teaching Modules (THTM) program is a health education curriculum for adolescents. Each THTM module frames an adolescent health task emphasizing development of self-assessment, communication, decision making, health advocacy, and self-management. This module presents a discussion on the special physical and mental characteristics…

Liberal arts approaches to university education and many theories of counseling share as a goal the development of critical thinking in the individuals served. Such thinking requires the ability to consider the context within which one is working and the context within which the events and ideas under consideration occur. William Perry has…

This study investigated the developmental patterns for 82 deaf individuals (9-19 years old) in field dependence, as measured by the Embedded Figures Test. A significant sex difference was found for these deaf subjects only at the age of 15, favoring males. The deaf subjects differed significantly from the hearing norm group only at ages 15 and 17.…

This report discusses three studies of 2- to 5-year-old children's interpretations of facial expressions in terms of (1) the structure of the emotional domain and (2) prototypic example, overlap, and range of emotion categories. In the first study, 78 children were asked to make similarity judgments about 10 photographed facial expressions by…

The final report summarizes beginnings as well as accomplishments of a program designed to develop materials for parents and teachers working with visually impaired children at the birth-24 month developmental level. The focus of the materials was to help parents and teachers prevent and remediate developmental lags associated with visual…

As early as 1932, Piaget posited four phases of development in moral judgments: amorality, egocentric morality, morality of constraint, and morality of cooperation. In the morality of cooperation, reciprocity (i.e., social reversibility) develops first on a concrete level and then on the level of abstract reciprocity or generalized exchange. In…

This paper offers a social learning explanation for age-related changes in children's cognitive functioning. Three hypotheses have been derived from the assumption of Piaget that structures play the preeminent role in cognitive development: (1) a child can not profit from or even appreciate experiences which are meaningful at a higher stage of…

This paper discusses the kind of knowledge and strategies necessary to understand a metaphor. Studies of six year olds indicate that they fail to recognize that metaphors are intended nonliterally. At about the age of ten, children begin to give appropriate explanations. Children on the verge of metaphoric understanding of metaphors which link…