The intellectual development of students as defined by Piagetian theory is discussed with the implications that the theory and recent research results may have for teaching science. Recommended is conducting small, carefully planned investigations that will lead to a better understanding of: (1) what concepts cause problems and why; (2) what…

This study examined children's development of the concept of the reciprocal relationship of question and answer by asking subjects to form questions to fit given answers and to form answers for given questions. A total of 72 children (18 per grades 1, 4, 7, and 10) participated in the study. Each child was tested individually on two tasks (the…

This paper reports a study which examined the relationships of various facets of sensorimotor performance to abilities measured by a developmental examination of a sample of full-term and pre-term infants nine months after expected term date. This study addressed three questions: (1) Are there differences in the sensorimotor development of term…

Two experiments examined the effects of task-specific instructions on the recall and recognition memory of kindergarten, 2nd and 5th grade children for pictorial stimuli. In Experiment 1, a recall test was used and prior to stimulus presentation subjects were given one of three instructions: either a Recall-specific set, a general Remember set, or…

This paper reviews the biological origins of the critical period hypothesis and the neurophysiological evidence which was initially supplied in support of a critical period for the acquisition of language. Noting the inconclusive nature of neurophysiological evidence, the author suggests that we look to the interplay of affective and cognitive…

This cognitive/performance module is designed to teach the use of diagnostic techniques beyond those techniques provided by traditional mass testing. Terminal objectives include: (a) identifying a learning goal, (b) identifying a child who cannot successfully accomplish the learning goal, (c) diagnosing the child's learning strengths and…

Research carried out on El Salvador's Educational Reform project in the first school year that used instructional television (February-November, 1969) is summarized in this report. Focusing on the 32 pilot classes using television, together with 16 other classes without television, chapters include the administrative history of the Reform, studies…

This represents the latest in a series of efforts, on-going since 1965, to up-date and revise a listing of continuously received literature which pertains to the Taxonomy. (TL)

Acoustic studies have shown that phonetic context can have substantial effects on the cues associated with a given speech sound. The present study investigates whether or not modifications in the acoustic correlates of initial stops and fricatives due to the following vowel can affect phonemic decision processes. In the first of two experiments,…

Ten kindergarten and 46 first grade children were given two-choice object discrimination problems, during which a prompt indicated the positive (rewarded) object, P. Guided by the prompt, all Ss subjects displaced P and therefore observed only its reward value; no direct observation was made of the reward value of the negative (nonrewarded)…

Young children were studied in tasks that required them to select one object as "different" from another. Children systematically selected maximally similar objects until about 3 years of age, and thereafter performed correctly. Additional data derived from the children's verbal justifications and refusals to select suggested a 4-stage model in…

Sixty-four 8-year-old children were divided into fast and slow learner groups and trained on a tactile simultaneous discrimination task. Selective attention was measured in terms of percentage contact time per trial to the relevant dimension. Inter- and intracouplings per trial were also recorded. A multivariate analysis was carried out to examine…

Arguments for an extension of Piaget's theory of cognitive development have been derived from philosophical and historical considerations of modern natural science. Implicit contradictions, which characterize these sciences as well as common thought, can be systematically apprehended only through a dialectic reinterpretation. The dialectic basis…

Two studies examined how nonconservers use the dimensions relevant to quantity in the conservation of substance task. Most nonconservers are very selective in their use of the information provided by these dimensions. Most preschool and kindergarten nonconservers used length to define amount, while ignoring width. This was true regardless of how…

This study is based on an earlier investigation by Brant and Trabasso, in which it was demonstrated that 4-year-old children could perform transitive inferences when training forced information encoding by involving questions about two comparative dimensions of an object (long and short). The present study was designed to examine the sources of…