Excerpt of a PhD dissertation submitted to the New York University School of Education

To determine whether mainstreaming affects the nonhandicapped student's cognitive schema of the handicapped, a story about a physically handicapped boy was read to 28 fourth grade children in a mainstreamed classroom and 29 nonmainstreamed children. The 10 characteristics attributed to the handicapped boy in the story (acquisition items) and 8…

A discussion of models of intellectual development and their application to education identifies the two major groups of such models and examines recent attempts to combine them. The two types of theories are described as the psychometric models, which see intellectual growth as the incremental amassing and associating of discrete ideas, and the…

The study involving 54 learning disabled (LD) students (7 to 11 years old) and 54 regular class students (3 to 7 years old) investigated the developmental patterns for the comprehension of complex temporal references. Three types of stimulus sentences were designed to test the comprehension of temporal references employing the temporal…

This paper is intended to serve as a stimulant to further efforts to interrelate Jean Piaget's ideas on cognitive development with the broad perspective on reading developed by Peter Spencer, the founder of the Claremont Reading Conference. The three sections of the paper deal with the following areas: an analysis and comparison of Piaget's and…

The developmental sequence of preschool children's moral judgments, and their emphasis on intentions versus property damage was investigated. Eight moral judgment stories with drawings were read to twelve 3 1/2- and twelve 4 1/2-year-old children (mean ages = 46.6 and 54.0 months, respectively). The stories included either positive or negative…

Studies of concept formation in infancy have demonstrated that certain experimental settings can elicit spontaneous behavior from infants which has been called "sorting" or "object grouping". This study pursues the issue of early sorting with infants as young as 6 months, and with a broader range of stimuli than has been used…

Interest has recently revived in the theory that the left and right hemispheres of the brain control distinguishable facets of cognitive behavior. Robert Samples has described the realm of the left hemisphere as that of rationality, logic, linear thinking, and separation of reality into its component parts. He sees the right hemisphere as the…

A teacher training program in blind education is described which is based on Piagetian concepts of cognitive development. It is explained that the teacher is trained to be more concerned with process than with content. Four competencies of a process-oriented teacher (including skill in administering Piagetian reasoning instruments) are outlined,…

This paper describes an on-going research program focused on the development of attention in children with specific reference to the strategies and patterns of activities which children use in seeking information and in directing and controlling their own attention. Findings from three earlier studies suggest that older children are better able…

This paper reviews the research and commentary literature on techniques, traits, and success factors for teachers of the disadvantaged. The author categorizes and discusses behaviors for teachers of the disadvantaged within four selected dimensions: 1) Affective (related to the teacher's attitudes, emotions, feelings, and values), 2) Cognitive…

A scheme of student cognitive growth is suggested by a combination of Piaget's developmental stages and Bruner's imagery-related stages: the concrete level, for which imagery is not necessary; the concrete-imagery level, with imagery for enrichment of the concrete; the representational level, for which imagery is needed to make the translation to…