Thirty-six children between four and seven years of age were asked a series of questions to determine their degree of insight (meta-cognitive awareness) regarding the way four common variables influence the ease with which a person can perform the three cognitive tasks of remembering, communicating, and attending. The four variables were the…

Recent research projects have indicated that a majority of adolescent and adult students have not reached a formal level of cognitive functioning and must therefore be taught rhetorical modes such as comparison and classification. A study was constructed to investigate the cognitive skills development of average college freshmen and to test…

While the chapters of this book present a variety of perspectives, they share the common goal of redirecting and revitalizing research on written composition. The authors review research on written discourse and the composing process and raise questions regarding information and skills that teachers and researchers need to consider. The chapters…

This multiple case study investigated the relationship between kindergarten teachers' questions and children's responses. The classroom discussions of 4 groups of children and their teachers (all middle income level) were taped and classified into five different question and response categories. Results indicated that: (1) some teachers ask more…

The primary objective of this study was to describe those mental processes in which teachers engage while making preactive planning decisions. This objective was approached by means of a detailed descriptive case study of one elementary teacher's planning decisions for a five-month period. The study was designed to address a need for descriptions…

The purpose of this study was to describe the preactive decisions made by a group of elementary teachers as they plan reading instruction for ten unfamiliar children as though it were the beginning of a new school year. Participants in this simulation were provided with a complete profile on each child's school and family background. Resulting…

Two studies explored the possibility of inducing conservation understanding in intellectually normal preschoolers and mildly mentally retarded children of comparable mental age. Retarded children, MA 3-10 to 5-0, received Verbal Rule instruction. Three- and 4-year-old children were given Verbal Rule training in a 2 x 2 x 2 factorial design…

The historical development and recent applications are described of the picture sequencing format (PSF), a testing device which requires the subject to designate a complete and correct order for a set of related pictures. The earliest use was by Decroly in 1914 and perhaps the best known use is in the Wechsler intelligence tests. Special…

Four scales developed by Marion Monroe for recording, describing, analyzing, and rating children's oral language skills are described and presented in this paper. The skills assessed by the scales are first described as follows: (1) how a child thinks, as revealed by the quality of ideas; (2) how a child thinks, as revealed by definition of words;…

The testing of a number of hypotheses about the effect of hearing a prior context sentence on immediate processing of a subsequent target sentence is described. According to the standard deep structure model, higher level processing (e.g. semantic interpretation, integration of context-tarqet information) does not occur immediately as speech is…

Design and results of an investigation attempting to analyze and improve children's solution processes in elementary addition and subtraction problems are described. As background for the study, a conceptual model was developed based on previous research. One dimension of the model relates to the characteristics of the tasks (numerical versus word…

Sex differences in activity selection or choice appear by age 12 or 18 months. These choices are one of the earliest indicators of sex differences in the behavior of young children. Differences in activity participation or toy choices are evident long before the emergence of sex differences in personality characteristics like passivity or…

Numerous studies report that depression is the most common psychiatric disorder of the elderly. According to the behavioral view, depression results from inadequate, ineffective or insufficient positive reinforcement. In contrast, the cognitive position sees depression as a result of negative thinking about oneself, one's experience, and the…

This study of teacher decision-making behavior investigated ten elementary teachers' teaching styles, decision-making behavior, and concepts of students. Each teacher was videotaped six times at intervals over the school year. The teachers viewed the tapes and at various points were asked to describe what they believed they were thinking about at…

Fifty-five recent studies of individual differences (IDs) in elementary cognitive tasks (ECTs) are reviewed. Twenty-five data sets are examined, analyzed, or reanalyzed by factor analysis. The following promising dimensions are identified: basic perceptual processes, reaction and movement times, mental comparison and recognition tasks, retrieval…