Concepts used by two classes of grade eight students, one advanced and the other average, to explain the changes that occur when water is heated to boiling are presented. Little difference was found between groups in terms of the personal misconceptions used to explain boiling. The changes that take place in conceptual knowledge immediately after…

Combined free response questionnaire and interview procedure are used to probe students' ideas regarding how they believe they see both luminous and nonluminous objects and how they think they hear source of sound. From large sample of students studied (n=1901), prevalence of ideas in different age groups is compared, and progression can be seen.…

Examined children's emotional and cognitive responses to emotionally evocative vignettes. Results indicated age-related increases in children's responses. Found limited increases with age in children's concordant emotions, or emotions identical to emotions of persons in the vignettes, and continuous increases with age in children's attributions…

Discusses ideas outlined in a recent report from the Council on Physical Education for Children on the importance of a success-orientated physical education (PE) program for elementary school students. Emphasizes the importance of (1) instructionally appropriate PE; (2) motor skill and movement concept development; (3) social and emotional…

Presents a checklist of core behaviors for use in assessing students' strengths, weaknesses, and changes in thinking skills. Lists persistence, decreased impulsivity, flexibility, metacognition, checking for accuracy, problem posing, drawing on past knowledge and experience, transfer of skills to new situations, precision of language, and…

Summarizes researchers' beliefs about cognitive development. Topics include (1) the child as constructive thinker; (2) new research methods; (3) the characterization of children's cognitive development; (4) estimates of children's competence; (5) stages of development; (6) interrelations among developmental skills; (7) mechanisms of development;…

Seventeen preschool children, 26 kindergarten, and 26 fourth grade childrens' knowledge structures were examined with a word association task and a match-to-sample picture task to determine whether or not children used slot-filler categories as a mediating structure between event-based and taxonomic knowledge structures as proposed by Nelson…

Four experiments determined that kindergartners' and second graders' inductions are sensitive to the similarity between premise and conclusion categories. Second graders' inductions are sensitive to the similarity of a premise category to a higher order category that includes the premise and conclusion categories. (BC)

Twelve two year olds were taught novel count nouns for related but unfamiliar objects. Children's interpretation of the relations between the nouns was mediated by the similarity of the objects, a result that suggests that, by age two, children have the conceptual and lexical abilities necessary for establishing hierarchical relations. (LB)

In four experiments, three, four, and five year olds were successful in solving perspective-taking problems when they were asked what object occupied a specified location with respect to a hypothetical observer. Results indicated developmental change in several important aspects of spatial performance. (BC)

Examined are first-year medical students' (n=160) explanations of complex concepts in cardiopulmonary physiology following a lecture series. The results revealed systematic misconceptions by the students in developing a pathophysiological model of the problem. The implications for science instruction within a medical curriculum are discussed.…

Discusses formalizing in mathematics and provides anecdotal illustrations of formalizing in a constructivist environment, using students aged 12 and 8 involved in fraction work. (Contains 19 references.) (MKR)

Reviews four books: (1) "On Intelligence. . .More or Less: A Bioecological Treatise on Intellectual Development" (Stephen J. Ceci); (2) "Knowing Children: Experiments in Conversation and Cognition" (Michael Siegal); (3) "Adolescents and Their Families: Paths of Ego Development" (S. T. Hauser and others); and (4) "Adolescence: An Anthropological…

For a sample of 69 mothers and their preschool-age children, mothers completed measures that assessed their social networks and perceived parenting difficulty, and children's peer acceptance and cognitive performance were assessed. Maternal network characteristics directly predicted children's cognitive performance and indirectly predicted…

External memory strategies were investigated in 45 children (age 11) with mild mental retardation and children (ages 7 and 11) without mental retardation. In contrast to expected deficiencies in the use of strategies, results showed areas of overlap in strategy capabilities among the groups. (Author/DB)