A first hand report of a UNESCO Conference on Early Childhood Education which met to explore scientific knowledge about the development of young children from birth to six years of age, ways of providing education better adapted to realities of every day life, and implications for lifelong education. (CS)

Secondary analysis of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement findings suggest early school entry results in higher mathematics achievement, but not reading or science achievement, as measured at ages 10 and 13. Possible explanations lie in developmental learning sequences, variations between homes and…

A brief analysis of the cognitive, psychic, and social changes characteristic of today's middle-school-aged child. (CS)

Maintaining that critical reading is critical thinking, this paper presents a teaching method that adapts the critical thinking/reading process to the model of reading proposed by W. S. Gray. The paper describes the four steps of the Gray model (word perception, comprehension of persuasive language, student judgment of the soundness of the…

A study involving 26 children, aged five to eight years, employed a clinical interview method to examine the children's recognition and knowledge of rule violations in communication. The rules, derived from H. P. Grice's "be cooperative" principle, referred mainly to the maxim "be perspicuous, unequivocal, clear, and…

This document focuses on a series of studies that viewed aspects of conditional reasoning. The investigations were concerned with the processes children use to acquire patterns of deductive inference and logical relationships pertaining to propositional reasoning. The first experiment, involving 96 children each in grades 2 and 5, investigated the…

The papers contained in this document were originally presented at the May 1978 conference on Modeling Mathematical Cognitive Development sponsored by the Models of Learning Mathematics Working Group of the Georgia Center for the Study of Learning and Teaching Mathematics. Most have been revised to reflect comments and suggestions made at the…

Intended as a chapter in "Carmichael's Manual of Child Psychology," this paper provides an overview and interpretation of the work already completed on children's learning, remembering, and understanding with a major concentration on academic cognition. The first part of the paper provides a brief overview of the principal trends of the 1970s and…

This evaluation of the New York State Experimental Prekindergarten (PreK) Program was designed to investigate the extent to which efforts to enhance program continuity through staff development activities produced lasting effects on children's cognitive and noncognitive development. Three children in each of seven of the 48 PreK school districts…

Educators have relied on the work of Jean Piaget for many years in an effort to understand the intellectual capabilities of children and adolescents. Piaget, however, did not consider instruction and school experiences to be factors that influenced children's conceptual development. The Soviet psychologist, Lev Vygotsky, proposed the opposite:…

A study was undertaken to determine if a criterion referenced test based on a Piagetian stage model of reading acquisition was related to grade level, to a standardized reading achievement test, and to a test of cognitive developmental level. Sixty first, second, and third grade children were administered a comprehensive test of basic skills. They…

Two children's spontaneous utterances containing the comparative structure are examined for their semantic content. Many comparatives are found to encode the notion "A has property X," and this use is often found in reference to the presence of X to an extreme, rather than a non-extreme, extent. The uses of the comparative are analyzed…

The focus of this paper is on how bilingual children may benefit through a reading method that allows them opportunities to perceive and conceptualize aspects of the English language using a Piagetian model. The paper presents the analysis and prevention methods used for correcting difficulties encountered by bilingual students, and argues that…

This document focuses on one child's skip counting methods. The pupil, a second grade student at Steuben School, in Kankakee, Illinois, was interviewed as she made several attempts at counting twenty-five poker chips on a circular piece of paper. The interview was part of a larger study of "Children's Conceptions of Number and Numeral,"…