Results suggest that children can use the rules of conversational sequencing to evaluate the need for an inference to the speaker's intent when speakers deliberately violate a rule. This ability is acquired by six or seven years of age, but children do not correctly infer the speaker's intent until they are eight or nine years old. (Author/RH)

Forms and functions of social comparison verbalizations were studied among preschoolers in a naturalistic setting. Each social comparison statement was coded into content (ability, possession, status, attitude, activity) and function (diffentiation/similarity, cognitive clarity, evaluative, competitive) categories. Results indicated preschoolers…

Descries professional overspecialization and education's overemphasis on the acquisition of formalized information. Discusses the capabilities of the hemispheres of the brain and the problems caused by focusing on only the left hemisphere. Illustrates intuition and abstract patterns. Suggests that recognition of laterality will advance education…

To determine the effects of a teacher's level of questioning on the development of children's problem-solving ability, children were exposed to three five-week treatment conditions in a half-day laboratory nursery school program. High-level cognitive questioning seemed to result in children's ability to generate significantly more alternative…

Describes group training model that differs from the traditional T-group model in structure, leadership, and assumptions about learning. The life-cycle model is based on situational leadership, differential structures based on group maturity, and integration of conceptual and experiential learning. (Author)

Second-, third-, and sixth-grade children (N=48) were presented sets of categorically-related pictures, were either prompted or not prompted to identify categories and later asked to recall categories. Recall time for second- and third-grade prompted children was significantly less than for nonprompted peers. No differences were found with sixth…

Results indicated that progress through adolescence leads to greater differentiation, abstraction, and integration. The emergence of the ability to abstract was considered the most important cognitive development in the adolescent's self-system. Major transformations appeared after age 15. (Author/DB)

Results support the hypothesis that certain classification skills underlie two types of role-taking ability: (1) in which children were asked how another child would think a cartoon ended if shown only the beginning; and (2) in which children were asked how another child would think a cartoon began if shown only the end. (Author/DB)

Studies relating time (in four ranges--years, days, hours, and minutes) to educational outcomes are reviewed. The need to include time as one factor in a theory of educational productivity is discussed. (Author/JD)

The article provides a rationale for the consideration of the processing differences of exceptional learners and discusses how these differences influence the development of the skills necessary for normal school achievement. (PHR)

Since several investigators have found language and play development to be interrelated, free play classifications were constructed for the assessment of social participation, cognitive play, and nonplayful activities for both normally hearing and hearing impaired preschoolers. (Author)

A study of the cognitive and academic skills of an agency's foster children indicated that the general level of functioning was similar to that of low-income and minority children living with their own families. (Author/DB)

Category theory concept of a commutative diagram was used to construct a model of the way in which symbolic processes are applied to problem solving. It was shown that several different levels of thought can be distinguished within the basic model. Two experiments testing the theory are reported. (Author/RD)

The central idea behind this study is that at about seven years of age the concept of normative difficulty emerges, resulting in changes in interpretation of terms such as "hard" and "easy," as well as of normative cues. (Author/DB)