The Committee on the Student in Higher Education conducted an 18-month study of various social and psychological influences that shape student attitudes, interests, and activities, and presents several recommendations that it believes could improve the quality of higher education. The report is based on the assumption that the college is a major…

In 1966, Powel Elementary School initiated an ungraded system to discover if this program would meet the needs of its students and community. In 1967-68, an evaluation of this ungraded program was made to determine if the reading and arithmetic performance levels of the students at Powel were higher than those of a matched graded school. An…

The concern here is with kinds of cognitive structures individuals use in making major life choices upon which subsequent development depends. The system conceptualized for describing these psychological processes, pictures each choice domain (such as occupations) as a set of concentric squares. The outermost square deals with total knowledge of…

Conditional logic, as interpreted in this paper, means deductive logic characterized by "if-then" statements. This study sought to investigate the knowledge of conditional logic possessed by primary children and to test their readiness to learn such concepts. Ninety students were designated the experimental group and participated in a…

It was hypothesized that the acquisition of conservation behavior would be facilitated when stimuli were more concrete than abstract. Eighty white second graders were randomly assigned to four groups and presented with three conservation-of-weight problems. Clay balls and the conservation transformations were either shown, demonstrated, and…

The development of thinking is accepted as the most comprehensive aim of American education. A prominent means of stimulating pupils' thinking in the classroom is the effective use of questions. To design a good question, the teacher should begin by analyzing the type of thinking to be fostered and settle on the type of task to initiate such…

The child's ability to identify numerousness as a property of a set, distinct from all the other properties of that set, may be a prerequisite to conservation of numerousness of sets. To test this theory, 11 lessons designed to develop the ability to identify properties of objects and of sets of objects and to represent length and numerousness…

Conservation of a property is the ability to recognize that the property in question hasn't altered, even though other properties have been varied. It is Piaget's view, confirmed by empirical evidence that children are not able to conserve length until age 7 or 8. Recent concern over confounding variables led to the present study in which the…

The OST is a technique quite different from anything reported elsewhere in the literature. The model underlying OST work assumes that an individual's intellect, at any given point in time, is the set of all information he has at his disposal at that point in time. The set of concepts an individual has at any point in time may radically change over…

This paper discusses questioning patterns that can be used by teachers to facilitate cognitive development in reading instruction. The questioning patterns suggested are intended to include the kinds of questions used on worksheets, tests, and in class projects. The opinions of various authors who stress the importance of teacher questioning…

The author developed three instruments which operationally defined certain probability concepts and combinatorial abilities and subsequently used the instruments to classify the 90 subjects of the study according to their conceptual strategies or ability levels. The subjects were high school biology students from one school; all were taught by the…

Investigated was the assumption that college students are fully capable, by the time they enter college, of operating at the level of formal thought. The subjects selected for this study were students in chemistry and physics courses at a state university and an inner-city community college. Each student was tested with a Piegetian task to…

The relationship between scores on three area conservation tasks and scores on two area measurement tasks, as affected by two sequences of presentation of Piagetian tasks to children in grades one through three, was investigated. The five area tasks were administered individually to 168 children ranging in age from six years five months to nine…

This document presents case studies of children from five preschools of Head Start's Planned Variation Program. The case studies are designed to reflect the meaning of the preschool experience for each individual child, with emphasis on changes in self concept, concepts of the world, interpersonal interactions, and task-oriented behavior. Children…

This study investigated the effects of sex of child, age, rationale focus, rationale orientation, and maturity of moral judgment on resistance to deviation in 120 children (7 to 11 years old) using the standard punishment paradigm. Children were randomly assigned to a consequence- or intentions-focused rationale with an object or person…