This is the second volume in a series that records the official Symposium Proceedings of the Jean Piaget Society and examines the theoretical, empirical, and applied aspects of Jean Piaget's seminal epistemology. The 12 papers are divided into four areas: language development, formal reasoning, social cognition, and applied research. The topics of…

A study proposing reality and fantasy discrimination of television content as a classificatory ability sought to identify differences between subjects who were able to make sophisticated reality-fantasy judgements and those who were not, and factors which might contribute to a subject's sophistication in discrimination. Open-ended and structured…

The paper describes an experiment in which 52 deaf children (7-19 years old) and 36 normal hearing children (7-16 years old) were given several Piagetian conservation tasks to determine if the conventional instructions are the basis for conservation failure in deaf children and to examine the order in which deaf Ss acquired various forms of…

The question of how Piaget selects mathematical concepts for his theory is addressed as a problem which may have contributed to a misinterpretation of the relevance of conservation studies for mathematics education. A new form of pseudo-conservation is discussed in which nonconservers of length are able to pick out strips of equal length from an…

Students in grades 5, 8, 11, and college were administered Piagetian tasks dealing with horizontals and verticals. The tasks were the bottle task, the pendulum task, and the faucet task. The results disagreed with Piaget's suggested timetable. Since the horizontal task results did not yield a majority of correct predictions for any of the groups,…

This review of the current state of research on how children make sense of television and its content examines age-related differences in children's interpretations of television entertainment content in general, and advertising content in particular. A brief analysis and description of the fundamental principles of cognitive development theory…

This study examined the nature of sex-related differences in spatial ability. Results indicated that sex-related cognitive differences are concentrated among subjects having poor spatial ability. Suggestions for remedial education of females and males are given. (MK)

The approaches and methods of teaching and learning social studies are examined. Fundamental study skills are emphasized: effective questioning techniques, data gathering, ability to recognize relationships in terms of time and space, and ability to recognize facts, opinions, and propaganda. To develop these skills it is recommended that priority…

SEVERAL APPROACHES FOR TEACHING BIOLOGY IN EIGHTH GRADE CLASSES WERE COMPARED FOR EFFECTIVENESS IN IMPROVING STUDENT'S CRITICAL THINKING ABILITIES, UNDERSTANDING OF SCIENCE, AND KNOWLEDGE OF MAJOR CONCEPTS AND FACTS. STUDENTS WERE RANDOMLY ASSIGNED TO THREE CLASSES, EACH TAUGHT BY A TEAM OF THREE TEACHERS. CLASS A USED A TEXTBOOK LABORATORY…

AN EXPLORATION OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN AN INDIVIDUAL'S PATTERN OF LIVING AND THE RETENTION OF MENTAL ABILITIES WITH AGE WAS MADE AND EVALUATED. THE OBJECTIVES WERE (1) TO ESTIMATE THE EFFECTS OF AN 11-YEAR INCREMENT (50-61) UPON EIGHT MEASURABLE MENTAL ABILITIES, (2) TO ESTIMATE THE EFFECT OF THE GIVEN AGE INCREMENT UPON INDIVIDUAL AND TRAIT…

The goal of this paper is to describe the black cultural style and to demonstrate its relationship to the cognitive development of black children. Children raised within a black cultural environment tend to develop a relational cognitive style rather than the more analytic style required in American schools. Children's cognitive styles are based…

This paper presents the thesis that a perceptual rationale for visual literacy may be found in operational form within what is measured by established tests of cognitive style. Ten primary dimensions of cognitive style are briefly reviewed, including field independence-field dependence, impulsivity-reflectivity, visual-haptic, leveling-sharpening,…

Piaget's early contribution to theorizing about play is discussed critically with reference to three major interrelated problems. These are: (1) that despite their equipotentiality in Piaget's theory of intelligence, imitation and play are not conceptualized as making an equal contribution to cognition, play taking a subordinate role; (2) that…

Twenty-four profoundly deaf children (7 to 13 years old) from a residential school were presented with conservation problems of liquid, matter, weight, and volume. Analyses of variance showed that age was significant beyond the .01 level and type of task (conservation) at the .25 level. No significant sex effect was found. Differences among means…

THIS MANUAL DESCRIBES MEASURES USED IN "THE COGNITIVE ENVIRONMENTS OF URBAN PRE-SCHOOL CHILDREN" PROJECT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO. THE SAMPLE FOR THE STUDY CONSISTED OF 163 NEGRO MOTHER-CHILD PAIRS SELECTED FROM 3 SOCIOECONOMIC CLASSES BASED ON THE FATHER'S OCCUPATION AND THE PARENTS' EDUCATION. A FOURTH GROUP INCLUDED FATHER-ABSENT…