Outlines methods of teaching moral issues to undergraduate students using works of Lawrence Kohlberg, William Perry, Jr., Erik Erikson, and Elisabeth Kubler-Ross in conjunction with literary tests. Encourages comparative and illustrative studies of literature and film. Suggests student participation in cognitive and moral decision making of…

Examined effects of cognitive focusing training in early and late concrete operational children. Focusing was manifested by the late concrete operational children regardless of whether or not they had been trained. The amount of negative feedback and the nature of the probe techniques affected the manifestation of focusing. (Author/DB)

Reviews evidence for a developmental sequence in symbolic play and attempts to provide a theoretical rationale for predicting correspondences between symbolic play and early language. (Author/RH)

Development of gender understanding in preschool age children was studied over eight months. Understanding appeared to follow an orderly sequence according to the person referred to: first, when the self was the referent; second, when a same-sex other; third, when an opposite-sex other. (Author/DB)

Examined the relation between the spontaneous occurrence in play of simple two-part action sequences and the frequency of these sequences and their components following modeling at 12, 15, and 19 months of age. Play following modeling was typically more advanced but only 19-month-old children generally were able to imitate complete sequences.…

Discusses the use of visual media as symbol systems that gather, package, and convey knowledge. Media's different and often unique symbol systems are looked at as potentially serving as cultivators of mental abilities. Forty-nine references are provided. (Author/CHC)

Describes results of a study investigating the nature of Nigerian secondary school pupils' (N=120) difficulties in understanding the biological concepts of growth, reproduction, and transport mechanisms within living organisms. Identifies examples of common misconceptions. (CS)

Three tests were conducted to contrast the ability of bilingual and monolingual children to label and relabel objects. The findings show that bilingual subjects were significantly better than monolingual subjects, supporting the view that preschool bilingual education stimulates children's cognitive development, and enhances their self-concept.…

Adapting the cognitive behavior modification work of Bandura and Mahoney, the author suggests a "mediational approach" to teaching creativity in the art classroom; here the desired behavior is modeled, guided experience is offered for practice, then reward in the form of approval is given for successful completion of the event. (Editor/SJL)

Research evidence suggests that there are natural variations in children's learning, many of which can be categorized by age and sex. Educators must become knowledgeable about brain growth and its curricular implications. (SK)

The concept of equivalence is shown to be an elusive one that provides difficulty for preschoolers through college students. The idea persists that the equal sign is a "do something," or operator symbol, rather than a symbol for an equivalence relation. (MP)

Seven-year-olds and university students were questioned about hidden or visible colored counters. Under certain testing conditions, the children were able to demonstrate one of the major characteristics of formal operational thought, namely the ability to reason in terms of verbally stated hypotheses without reliance on direct, physical…

The paper reviews contributions of J. Piaget and others to the understanding of perception's importance in the cognitive development of mentally retarded children. The effects of poor discrimination learning on IQ scores are noted. (CL)

Questionnaires were administered to 214 Mexican American adolescents to determine their attitudes toward television commercial truthfulness and to examine those attitudes in concert with developmental levels of reasoning among high school students. Fifteen references are listed. (FM)

Class inclusion problems differing in size of the array and in superordinate class were given to 84 boys and girls in grades 1 through 4 in a first experiment, and 41 boys and girls in grades 3 and 4 in a second experiment. The experiments sought to determine performance variables explaining the developmentally late appearance of class-inclusion…