Investigated the pedagogical quality of physical space by adapting a classroom to create a material "educational field" and testing children's performance on a "go to the front and right of the tower" activity. Found that the educational field made it possible for children to put into relation two spatial reference systems and…

Three studies investigated how experiencing nearby locations together in time influenced memory for location in 7-, 9-, and 11- year-olds and adults. Findings suggested that experiencing nearby locations together in time increased the weight children assigned to categorical information in their later estimates of location. Results were similar…

Explores the question, What is the role of school grounds as sites for learning? Observation and interview data from five Australian primary schools displayed large differences between schools in the types of play that 8- to 10-year-old children engaged in, particularly play behaviors categorized as involving environmental cognition. Explores the…

Integrates recent views of early perceptual-cognitive growth with accounts on the development of communication in infancy. Emphasizes supporting evidence for a view that combines innate perceptual and constructive mechanisms with associative memory in explaining how human infants process information. Also considers how the sociocultural…

Two experiments with monolingual German-speaking 2.5- to 4.5-year-olds showed a consistent developmental gap between children's memory/inference of what someone wanted and what someone wrongly said or thought. Correct answers emerged with mastery of the false-belief task. It was concluded that the observed gap constrains de Villiers's linguistic…

Considers how theories of learning can inform the practice of science teaching in formal settings and describes two broad strands of learning theory that have been drawn upon in science education, namely individual and sociocultural views. Shows how aspects of both views can usefully inform understanding of teaching and learning in science in…

Explores new doctors' perceptions of their educational development during the first year of postgraduate training. Uses semi-structured open interviews with pre-registration house officers and investigates their views on the importance of their experience to the General Medical Council's competencies. (Author/KHR)

Attempts to integrate the formulations of Brehm and Brehm and of Guidano and sets forth a cognitive theory of resistance and reactance within a cognitive developmental and individual differences context. Differentiates resistance from reactance and explores developmental antecedents of characterological reactance. Describes implications for…

Explores the use of the term "voice" in written discourse as a metaphor for "authority," a quality that distinguishes an effective writer. Proposes a "scale of negotiation" and a sequence of assignments for a 15-week term in which students gradually establish a position of authority over their texts. (RS)

Investigated the hypothesis that the meaning young children attribute to the word "big" may depend differentially on the object of reference. Children three and five years of age who were shown pairs of buildings and pairs of cars used a height rule for both classes of objects when interpreting big. (NH)

Asks reader to look beyond Seville Statement, Social Darwinism, and utopian ideals and come to understand ethical imagination more fully as it relates to peace studies. Examines Seville Statement and its opposition to Social Darwinism. Explains how ethical imagination serves to provide radical alternative to biological determinism. (Author/NB)

Testing of the similar structure hypothesis (which states that when matched for level of cognitive development, mentally retarded and nonretarded individuals do not differ in cognitive processes) with 40 mentally retarded adults and nonretarded mental age peers on Piagetian tasks found the developmental theory favored 4:1 over the difference…

Investigates the relationship between self-recognition and self-evaluative emotions in two studies on 27 children aged 9-24 months and 44 children aged 22 months. The results of both studies indicate that embarrassment but not wariness was related to self-recognition. (RJC)

Concurs with Myra Kogen's article ("Journal of Basic Writing," v5 n1) which questioned current applications of cognitive theory to basic writing research. Argues, from the perspective of cognitive psychology, that these applications are undermined by false assumptions and flawed methodology. (MM)

Five experiments involving children of 4-11 years investigated partonomic knowledge and its relation to the use of taxonomic organization. Results suggest that children are sensitive to parts of common objects and appear to be able to use this sensitivity to group objects in abstract, function-based, superordinate categories. (RJC)