Suggests that the central focus of the article by Raver and Leadbeter (PS 521 712) in this issue is the ways individuals know. Examines two ways of knowing, verbal responses to questions and action without verbal response; and outlines a four-level developmental sequence of knowing that develops from one's own knowing to having a perspective on…

Preschool children experienced two special events and were asked a set of questions about one of the events on four different occasions over a seven-week period. Findings suggest that adult questioning enhances memory for specific recall, but does not enhance general memory performance. Results raise issues regarding how much children tailor their…

Discusses the implementation and evaluation of a program designed to introduce student portfolios in place of formal assessments at a university preschool. Parents of an experimental group of 20 students who constructed portfolios had a better understanding of the preschool program's cognitive and academic components than parents of a control…

Presents an approach to quadratic functions that draws upon knowledge of linear functions by looking at the product of two linear functions. Then considers the quadratic function as the sum of three monomials. Potential advantages of each approach are discussed. (Contains 17 references.) (MDH)

Comments on Flavell's paper (PS 522 962) presented in the same issue. Stresses some of the positive aspects of preschoolers' conception of thinking, and raises questions about the relatively negative portrait of young child's introspective abilities. Discusses evidence of introspection among preschoolers, and underlines the special, and…

Comments on Flavell's paper in this issue. Examines the paper's findings on three different aspects of children's knowledge about thinking: their ability to differentiate thinking from other activities, their awareness that thinking is always going on in people's minds, and their capacity for introspection into their own thinking. Argues that…

Demonstrates that 11-year-old children's scientific thinking in formal operational terms can be significantly developed through training in the cognitive style of field independence determined by the Group Embedded Figures Test. Suggests students could perform formal operationally if they had the skill of identifying the variables to be…

In memory strategy utilization deficiency, a child spontaneously produces an appropriate strategy but receives little or no benefit from it for recall. Three studies suggest two causes: children's failure to relate the task situation to their event knowledge, or to link the strategy to a second strategy, in this case linking a selective attention…

Reviews two sets of play theories, classical and modern, noting that the reason and purpose for play are explained by classical theories; the role of play in child development, determined by modern theories. States that process of play has dual functions of personal expression and social adaptation. Examines the relationship between play and…

Examined the ability of 1-year olds to remember the location of nonvisible targets. Found that infants were able to associate a nonvisible target with a direct landmark and to code its distance and direction with respect to themselves or the larger framework. Difficulty of coding with indirect landmarks was associated with cognitive complexity and…

Two studies examined the progress in normally developing preschoolers' ability to produce actions with imagined objects (pantomimes). Found that young children not only had difficulty producing imaginary object representations in contrast to normal adults, they also had difficulty comprehending imaginary object representations and were better at…

Children need media literacy to absorb, interpret, understand, and use responsibly the messages they receive. Rather than being mere deliverers of content-based instruction, teachers should be mediators, models, and mentors in the use of information. (SK)

This paper attempts to integrate several different theories of the second-language learning process into a general theory of the human learners. Includes references. (JL)

Investigates numerical competence in five-month-old infants using a violation-of-expectation paradigm. Supports previous findings that young children possess not only the competence for limited numerical abstraction, but also the ability to carry out addition and subtraction operations. An alternative explanation, that infants' responses are based…

Examined changes in preschoolers' ability to distinguish among memories of performed, pretended, and imagined episodes, and used source monitoring as a tool for inferring the nature of preschoolers' conceptualization of pretense. Found significant improvements between ages three and four in their ability to distinguish performed actions from…