A study to investigate the development of children's ability to relate concepts and thus understand metaphors by examining their performance on three concept-relating tasks is reported. Abstract-metaphoric, concrete-metaphoric, and literal taxonomic relationships were embedded in an analogy-like binary choice task. In this type of task, the…

The document describes a process-oriented strategy for assessing children with atypical motor development. The Ordinal Scales of Psychological Development in Infancy by I. Uzgiris and J. Hunt are used as the content base. The intervention program focuses on teaching parents techniques for enhancing the child's functioning in sensorimotor, motor,…

The study investigated intrapersonal and interpersonal behaviors and events in self-injurious disabled persons (2-22 years old). The study involved four components: (1) a survey of 82 Ss using the self-injurious behavior (SIB) Perception Questionnaire, Antecedent/Consequent Card Sort, and the American Association on Mental Deficiency Adaptive…

This paper asserts that the most common mistake that adults make when relating to children who are grieving is to assume that children think like adults. It presents an outline of children's perceptions of death for children between the ages of 1 and 3, and for 4-year-olds, 5-year-olds, 6-year-olds, 7-year-olds, 8-year-olds, and 10-year-olds. The…

Relationships between motor and speech development and between speech and cognitive development are considered. Discussion first focuses on issues of motility, speech, and cognition. Brief descriptions of Steiner's postulated six additional senses--of warmth, movement, life, speech or word, thought, and ego--are provided as preparation to the…

This investigation examined whether advance organizers would help learning disabled (LD) adolescents to more efficiently process information on selected academic tasks. There were three phases: First, 51 LD and 63 normally achieving (NA) subjects participated in the development of a test to measure important and unimportant information. Second,…

This publication shares current thinking, research, and practice in the area of higher order thinking skills with home economics educators, including teachers, supervisors, and teacher educators. The first three articles provide general discussions of thinking skills. They are "Introduction" (Ruth Pestle); "Can Higher Order Thinking…

Observations were made of the incidence of pointing behavior among infants differing in age when a radio-controlled truck entered the room in which mother and infant were seated. Infants' reactions over 5 to 6 minutes were recorded on videotape. Recordings were analyzed to establish the incidence of pointing, handedness of pointing, whether…

The paper reviews research on the cognitive structures of gifted students. Theories of R. Sternberg and his triarchic model of intelligence are described. Sternberg asserts that three processes appear to account for insight: selective encoding, selective combination, and selective comparison. H. Gardner's perspective citing six types of…

Management of insulin dependent diabetes mellitus (IDDM) is a complex task that requires the adolescent with IDDM recognize the interaction between diet, exercise, stress, emotions, and insulin dosage. With regularity, however, adolescents with IDDM are shown to be in less good metabolic control than younger children or young adults. The study…

An examination of how new knowledge is acquired reveals that knowledge is organized in global conceptual constructs called schemata, and that the process of knowledge acquisition can be conceptualized as the articulation and restructuring of these schemata. Assuming that a schema is a generative structure with implications beyond what is…

Tasks based on the function concept (y = f(x)) were used in a study charting the development of anticipation in children from 5 through 7 years of age. In each task a desired outcome was a function of a combination of specific, rule-constrained, antecedent conditions. Subjects' behavior was scored according to criteria differentiating six levels…

Examined in three studies were the influence of perceptual organization on children's memory and the relationship between operational thought and memory performance. In the first study, 72 children at 5, 7, and 9 years of age were given a series of Piagetian tasks and a memory task. Subjects were presented with 10 color-shape pairs depicted in…

Concepts important to cognitive development in children can be classified according to several levels. At level 1, concepts are equivalent in structural complexity to binary relations and univariate functions. At level 2, concepts are equivalent to compositions of binary relations, binary operations, and bivariate functions. At level 3, concepts…

The paper reviews research on severe and profound hearing loss and notes implications for hearing impaired students of instrumental enrichment (IE), a cognitive learning approach featuring metacognition. The development of IE by R. Feuerstein is traced to initial work with disadvantaged groups who emigrated to Israel. Noted are such…