In an effort to cross-validate a Japanese study, a 16 item test of logical connectives was administered to 223 boys and girls at each grade level (third through ninth grades) and two groups of college sophomore girls. The purpose of the test was to assess their understanding of class inclusion and exclusion, class intersection, and class union.…

Fifty educable retarded children who were determined to be nonconservers by means of three conservation pretests (discontinuous quantity, correspondence, and continuous quantity) were randomly assigned to one of five treatment groups (discontinuous quantity training, correspondence training, continuous quantity training, control, and control…

An examination was made into the problems of development of creative reasoning. Historical comments regarding the probable development of creative thought were amplified by glimpses into the lives of several mythical prehistoric characters. Contemporary classroom techniques designed to stimulate creative thought were presented for use in the areas…

Understanding how the American Indian perceives the health and medical programs of the Anglo culture is the key to the United States Public Health Service in being able to raise the Indian's level of health to that of the general population. Vast differences between the American Indian, as represented by the Navajo, and the non-Indian are found in…

Experiments conducted to find ways of teaching two and three year olds mathematical concepts were found to have general implications for concept learning. The failure of an initial attempt to teach the concepts "fat" and "skinny" led to a design of instructional procedures that would utilize a concept's name while trying to teach its semantic…

This paper reviews and analyzes research in science education which focused on science concepts and science concept learning. Studies reviewed are grouped into eight categories: (1) cognitive development, (2) factors influencing concept formation, (3) level of concept attainment, (4) methodological effects, (5) methodological comparisons, (6)…

This paper reports an exploratory study in nonverbal communication, which had two objectives: (1) to look closely at touching as a communicative behavior and to describe the categories of behaviors; and (2) to evaluate the "Form for Observation of Physical Contact," developed in a previous study. A total of 47 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds,…

This study examined the effectiveness of the Science Curriculum Improvement Study (SCIS) materials for visually handicapped children. Fourteen students, ranging in age from 9 to 19 and working in small groups with student teachers, received science instruction using the adapted version of the SCIS program. Control subjects were matched closely on…

Two studies attempted to clarify the Intellectual Tasks test assessment of number conservation by testing for two possible artifacts due to procedure: (1) Effects of preceding questions on the following test questions, and (2) operations or manipulations of the test materials by the examiner. Forty Mexican-American first and second graders were…

An educational program based upon information processing theory has been developed at Southern Illinois University. The integrating theme was the development of conceptual ability for coping with social and personal problems. It utilized student information search and concept formation as foundations for discussion and judgment and was organized…

The research experiments on relational learning in young children contained in this report were guided by two major goals: (1) to examine the extent of conceptual transfer in preschool children, and (2) to explore the relation of both "acquisition" and "transfer" to chronological development. The performance of preschool…

This study investigated the spontaneous use of verbal mediators in discrimination learning, the transfer of mediators to a free recall task, and the effects of a pretraining task on performance. The discrimination tasks required nursery school children (80) to: (1) sort three instances each of two different concepts in a conceptually consistent…

This paper presents the theory that altruistic motives develop out of the synthesis of empathic distress and the child's increasingly sophisticated cognitive development, especially his level of self-other differentiation. An examination of empathy and the sense of other is included, followed by a discussion of empathic distress, various forms of…

Twenty-eight fourth graders, categorized as having high or low conceptual awareness, were used in this study to examine the effect of conceptual background on overt reading behavior; to compare overt reading behavior to post-reading performance; to analyze the relationship between overt reading behavior and cloze test behavior and performance; to…

Because poor "reading ability" is very often a primary obstacle in the learning process, an attempt was made to determine if the first grade child develops some knowledge structure by means other than reading. Instruction in each of six first grade classrooms was in the form of 18 audio-tutorial lessons, each taped to last about 15 minutes and…