Discusses the findings of a recent study concerning the ability of an infant to see an object as a symbol. Reports that infants between 36 and 39 months old significantly outperformed informed infants between 30 and 32 months old on a symbolic task. (TW)

Reports on a study in which the symbolic relation between a scale model and the larger space that it represents was displayed by two groups of young children. Three-year-old children outperformed 2.5-year-olds in finding an object in a room after seeing an analogous object hidden in a model. (TW)

Investigates children's ability to recognize the legitimate authority figure in a structured authority situation. Thirty children at each of three age levels--5, 8, and 11 years--were administered the Authority Measure, an instrument designed to elicit children's reasoning about authority figures. (Author/RWB)

Summarizes recent research which attempted to discover what children of different ages know about the appearance-reality distinction and related phenomena. Findings show that what helps children grasp the distinction is an increased cognizance of the fact that people are sentient subjects who have mental representations of objects and events. (PS)

Explores longstanding inconsistencies in Piaget's account of development of spatial representation and perspective-taking. Examines Piaget's early writings and the findings of the original "three mountains" experiment. Concludes that Piaget's alternative theory is compatible with contemporary thinking and is important as a contributory…

Argues that Susan Sugarman's article in this issue contains some valid criticism of assumptions in developmental psychology, but that some of her conclusions regarding other assumptions need to be questioned. Suggests that many problems raised by Sugarman would disappear if developmental psychologists concentrated on children's early achievements…

Curriculum units for gifted third-graders (N=48) were judged effective if gifted students receiving instruction outperformed gifted students not receiving instruction and also nongifted students receiving instruction. One unit was successful in teaching new concepts but not in developing higher levels of thought; inconclusive results were obtained…

Reviews research on aspects of metacognition in children's comprehension of television, particularly how skills in meta-memory, meta-attention, and meta-social cognition-correlate with comprehension. (PD)

States that comprehension of expository text and the ability to summarize are factors in students' success with such material. Describes a model that induces students to use existing schemata to create new and necessary expectations while providing a technique for explicitly teaching the components of effective summaries. (JK)

Evaluates some possible reasons for the occurrence and eventual correction of children's naming errors in an experiment in which two-, four-, and six-year-olds learned two artificial object names in succession. (HOD)

Compares two types of semantic development (the acquisition of disappearance words and success-failure words) to performance on two types of cognitive tasks (object-permanence and means-ends tasks) among infants. (HOD)

Implementation of programs of cognitive development need to be considered in the context of a schools readiness for educational change. Eight questions to help identify important issues focus on ability, values, ideas, circumstances, timing, obligations, resistance, and yield. (Author/DB)

Involving second, fourth, sixth, eighth, and tenth graders and undergraduates, three experiments evaluated the prediction that representations of knowledge of the weeks and months of the year develop from a verbal-list stage to a stage at which image representations are present. Results are interpreted as supporting the two-stage model and appear…

How multiplication is usually taught in school and how it could be taught are discussed. Development of understanding is illustrated through children's words and work. (MNS)

Noting that while formal operational thinking is essential to sociological learning, a majority of college freshmen are not yet fully formal thinkers. Maintains that introductory sociology courses must foster formal thinking in addition to teaching sociological content. Draws implications of revising goals and objectives to meet students' needs.…