Several curricula for early childhood education rely heavily upon Piagetian theory, based on the reasoning that children who have acquired operational structures of thought one or two years earlier than their peers are differently oriented to instruction than their more recently conserving peers. This paper emphasizes that there is no evidence…

Previously published articles on child development and learning are collected in this textbook for college students. Topics include cognitive development, achievement behavior, and social development. (SBT)

Very little cognitive development research has been done among African children, and most of the completed studies have relied on "translated" versions of Western test materials that are inappropriate to the African milieu. This paucity of research has had two affects: (1) rural African children have been represented as somewhat less…

Considerations and procedures for applying Performance-Structure Oriented computer-assisted instruction (CAI) are described in terms of a general diagram of the necessary elements in a CAI system. The fundamental objective is to lead the student to develop his own cognitive structures that will serve him for generating the surface structure of…

The present study was designed to explore the relationship between the theoretical models of cognitive development proposed by L. S. Vygotsky and J. Piaget. One hundred and four subjects aged four to sixteen years were selected. All subjects were in the average range of intelligence, were in the usual school grade for their age, and had no history…

Twenty-four papers prepared for a conference on Piagetian theory and its implications for the helping professions are included in this report. The conference included the following symposia: (a) Present Status of Formal Operations, (b) Implications of Piaget for the Development of Curriculum, (c) Arithmetic and the Development of Logical…

The instructional materials in this document include observational schedules for children ages 3-7 and diagnostic/instructional procedures in language arts and mathematics for 5-year-olds. The observational schedules are designed to assist teachers in judging the developmental levels of beginning school children. The schedules are intended as…

The purpose of this investigation was to determine the relationship between the acquisition of conservation skills and achievement in mathematics. The conservation skills measured were numbered, mass, area and volume. Mathematics achievement was measured by the Computation, Concepts, Problem-Solving and Total Mathematics scores on the Metropolitan…

The need for educational reform is argued, based on a growing awareness of the general ineffectiveness of school for most children. Alternative educational programs based on behavioral analysis are judged inadequate, because they are based upon the same inappropriate goals as traditional education. In order to make educational reform effective, it…

Research has indicated that across the second to fifth grade range, there was evidence to suggest a difference between the oldest and youngest groups in the memory representations which directed recall of logically related sentences. The developmental trend was from what seemed to be an unstable and fragmentary memory rperesentation, which…

A total of 34 children, ages 2 and a half to 6, were presented with sentences for imitation that either violated or honored a prenominal adjective ordering rule, which requires that size adjectives must precede color adjectives. Two response measures were evaluated in terms of these sentence types: latency to begin a sentence imitation and recall…

This document reports on Phase II of a 2-year research project. The first phase had investigated the effects of socioeconomic mix on the cognitive and social development of disadvantaged preschoolers. The objectives of Phase II were (1) to continue assessment of effects on the disadvantaged subjects over a 2-year span during which there were four…

Three studies were conducted to investigate the effects of extended syntactic elaboration conditions on paired-associate learning. Earlier studies have indicated that such conditions have facilitated paired-associate learning of retarded children. Study I involved 30 first grade children. As in previous studies, embedding stimuli to be associated…

The study attempted to show that the first grade child's learning in a new area must involve overt concrete experiences from which new ideas will be derived. Forty-nine students, assigned to six groups, were instructed on three scientific concepts. The verbal instruction technique was similar to that suggested in SCIS. The application segment…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether achievement motivation can be taught by either of two approaches common to the kindergarten. After being pre-tested for motivational levels, subjects were randomly placed in three groups: (1) cognitive-direct teaching of components designed to enhance motivation, (2) Social-social interaction…