This paper explores the issue of sex bias in a contemporary major theory of moral development, cognitive moral theory. It explains critical reactions by Carol Gilligan and others questioning whether cognitive moral theory adequately accounts for female moral reasoning and behavior in its theory and research procedures. Several general…

Authority is legitimized by the willingness of those subject to it to accept it. Authoritarianism develops when those subject to authority must be coerced into accepting it. This paper argues that to maintain legitimate authority and avoid becoming authoritarian, educators, educational institutions, and educational systems must be willing to…

A total of 80 children 4 to 7 years of age participated in a study attempting to establish (1) the frequency of classification performance by age and in relation to available classification criteria, and (2) the degree of preference for different classification criteria by age, particularly differences between figurative and operative criteria.…

Papert (1980) contended that the value of the Logo computer program lies in its ability to allow children to take control of their own learning processes and to acquire skills and concepts independently of a stifling curriculum generated by adults. It is argued here that Papert's ideas are preserved when teachers' modelling of cognitive strategies…

The way cognitive, event-related brain potentials (ERPs) can aid in further understanding of memory span change in children is discussed. ERPs are time-dependent changes in electrical activity of the brain (as recorded by scalp electrodes) following the presentation of a physical stimulus through auditory, visual, or somatosensory modalities. The…

The main purpose of the study was to ascertain whether the use of cost-benefit analysis by children tends to be age-related, a function of instructional mediation, both, or neither. The subjects included 220 first, second, third, and fourth graders ranging in age from six to nine years. One hundred and fourteen subjects were assigned to the…

Word association techniques were used to examine the growth of biological knowledge over a period of years, from fourth-grade to college students. Results were analyzed by classifying stimulus-response word pairs according to the nature of the relationship between the words in each pair. Three hypotheses were tested: (1) the proportion of enactive…

Research on logical competence in adulthood was framed by the general competence-moderator-performance model of life span cognitive development constructed by Overton and his colleagues. This approach was able to distinguish between logical knowledge necessary for task solution and informational processes that may facilitate or inhibit the…

How various types of repetition influence the development of memory for real-world events was investigated in a naturalistic case study of a 2-year-old's autobiographic memories as revealed in mother-child conversation recorded when the child was between 21 and 27 months of age. Two types of repetition were studied: repeated recall of the same…

Developed in response to deficiencies in verbal and quantitative skills demonstrated by students entering New Jersey colleges and taking the New Jersey Basic Skills Placement Test, this overview is designed to help interested educators orient themselves to the important and rapidly growing field of thinking skills instruction. The Task Force on…

Presented are abstracts and abstractors' analyses of four studies dealing with cognitive development, four studies dealing with attitudes, and two studies dealing with problem-solving. The cognitive development studies are: "College Chemistry and Piaget: The Relationship of Aptitude and Achievement Measures" (David Bender and Louis…

To foster individual development, educators must seek the gifts in every child, in those not demonstrating academic abilities as well as in the most brilliant. Instead of stifling thinking, creativity, and interest development, educators must encourage these behaviors. Currently, a big discrepancy exists between the child's potential and what…

In this test for age-related effects of perceptual interference under different task conditions, 240 subjects, 60 each in kindergarten and grades 1 through 3, learned the positions of 5 cards upon each of which 3 stimulus attributes--a word, a color, and a shape--were presented in different descending orders. Two stimulus conditions were employed,…

This booklet presents the text for an environmental education learning sequence designed to enhance environmental knowledge and environmental ethics by providing information about: (1) energy; (2) pollution; (3) interrelationships; (4) impacts; (5) cycles; and (6) quality of life. The sequence, suitable for students in grades 5 through 8, is based…

This study questioned whether children's relative inability to use the two cerebral hemispheres independently contributes to their difficulty with the simultaneous execution of conflicting tasks. Two naming tasks involving the identification of upright and inverted letters were employed; conditions differed according to how the letter pairs were…