Latin Americans stand much closer to the person they're speaking to than do North Americans. Why? It's all in our basic concepts of space. The author discusses why some North Americans may be having difficulty accepting the new open-space schools, and what can be done about it. (Editor)

Examines themes evident in children's and mother's definitions of illness to determine how views of illness develop. Subjects were 264 children (ages 6 to 12-11) and their mothers. Two issues were considered: (a) patterned similarity in illness definitions, and (b) developmental changes in illness concepts. (ED)

Children in grades 1, 3, and 5 and college students were given a variety of judgment tasks contrasting the comparison of quantity with the comparison of proportions to determine whether the understanding of proportions develops before formal operations. Results indicated that the comprehension of abstract relations requires formal operations.…

Reviews previous attempts to achieve comparability in the comparative study of social mobility. Existing cross-national comparisons of mobility are said to be invalid. A scale is proposed as a basis for valid cross-national comparisons. Its properties and achieved results are discussed. (AM)

Based on an M.A. thesis (Mitler) submitted to the Department of Psychology, Michigan State University, and reported in part at the meetings of the Midwest Psychological Association (Chicago, May 3, 1968).

From the Series "Social Studies Education: The Elementary School -- Focus on Inquiry.

Research supported by a grant form the U.S. Office of Education, Bureau of Research

Portions of this paper were read at the annual convention of the Eastern Psychological Association, April 1967.

Fifty-five preschool children, ages three and four, used an Apple II microcomputer to learn reading readiness concepts of "above,""below,""left," and "right." Available during indoor play periods for three weeks at a nursery school on the Stanford University campus, the microcomputer was accepted…

Information about individuals' representations of problems was obtained from studies on reasoning and problem categorization. College students (N=62) participated in a study of the transition from concrete to formal reasoning using the pendulum and chemical yellow tasks. Over a 10-12 week period, 47 students participated in 10 training sessions on…

The learning machine described in this paper acquires concepts representable as conjunctive forms of the predicate calculus and behaviors representable as productions (antecedent-consequent pairs of such conjunctive forms): these concepts and behavior rules are inferred from sequentially presented pairs of examples by an algorithm that is probably…