Textual meaning is not autonomous--not only do the meanings of texts change as contexts change but also the textual or sentence meanings change as cultural conventions change. A series of preliminary studies have established that children into the early school years believe that the speaker's intentions, especially when the speaker's belief is…

Several epistemic formulations have been advanced to explain cognitive development. Many writers have divided the field of psychology into three basic underlying models: the mechanistic, organismic, and dialectic models. An examination of epistemic positions reveals five broadly defined positions on how behavior develops within a given organism.…

This document contains papers presented at a symposium which was an outgrowth of the research project examining the cognitive deficits in mentally retarded persons. The studies which are discussed were designed to demonstrate that basic cognitive tasks are capable of predicting performance on standard measures of intelligence. The subjects of the…

The paper reviews definitions of differentiated curricula for gifted students and considers approaches for differentiation. Curriculum content can be modified by making it more abstract, more complex, more varied, and organized differently from the regular curriculum. Process modification can be accomplished through higher level thinking,…

Piagetian research provides the focus of this article in which Professor Thomas C. O'Brien interviews Professor Hermina Sinclair. Aspects of children's thinking that prefigure scientific theory construction are described and the influence of schooling in inhibiting or suppressing a theory-building human tendency is briefly discussed. The…

The purpose of this study was to measure the development of forethought in children as a function of age, thereby documenting a normal use of this facility. It was hypothesized that forethought would develop on a continuum increasing with age, with no significant differences due to sex of the child. To test this hypothesis, items were pooled which…

A special instructional intervention program to develop cognitive skills in hearing impaired adolescent students is analyzed and described, based on a special pilot project at the Model Secondary School for the Deaf (MSSD) at Gallaudet College. The program, Instrumental Enrichment, uses special pencil and paper exercises to focus on specific…

Somewhat as Piaget proposed the existence of formal operations acting on concrete operational structures, Basseches (1978) has proposed the existence of dialectical operations acting on formal operational structures. Basseches gives a qualitative account of dialectical operations via the enumeration of 24 schemata categorized into four groups:…

A study of toy-play mapping by three-, four-, and five-year-old children demonstrates that children can clearly represent a cognitive map at the age of three. Mapping, therefore, is developmentally primitive and formal map learning can begin at the age of school entrance. (JH)

This article discusses cognitive development as a primary educational objective and focuses on three cognitive processes: the prepared mind, the attending mind, and the processing mind. (PD)

Three experiments assessed the ability of 2 to 5-year-old children to infer, under very simple task conditions, what another person sees when viewing something from a position other than the children's own. (ST)

Evaluates the effects of a training procedure based on the organizational disequilibrium model of cognitive development. Subjects were children who displayed pretest structural profiles of varying levels of structural elaboration. (DP)

Discusses the impact of role playing on the change of moral judgment maturity in 96 college students. Subjects showed both immediate and delayed increases in moral judgment maturity when role playing a moral dilemma against an opponent who employed reasoning above the subject's initially assessed state. (LLK)

Article reviewed some recent research on hemispheric lateralization of the human brain. (Editor/RK)

Two hypotheses concerning children's treatment of "less" as a synonym of "more" were tested with 4- and 5-year-olds. It was hypothesized: (1) that the "less"-"more" distinction can be taught; and (2) that conservation is dependent on the capacity to distinguish "more" and "less". (Author/CS)