This paper advances the thesis that high level thinking in classrooms happens when students become conscious of experience and knowledge realities and decide to pursue them flexibly and creatively. The specific research focuses on the author's conviction that effective stimulators of student reflection will accommodate knowledge encounters that…

Issues of meaning have become central concerns of research on language development. There are at least four reasons for the neglect of meaning by earlier researchers. First, Chomsky's original theory assumed that syntax could be described and explained independently of meaning. Second, linguists had long assumed that semantics was too messy and…

The general aim of education is seen as creating possibilities for gaining experiences and acquiring knowledge, hence development of cognition. The knowledge ideal in education is understood within the frames of the historically produced scientific ideal, which also indicates the road by which knowledge may be obtained. This historical production…

A series of studies focused on (1) the evolution of the notion of identity of objects among infants up to 15 months of age and (2) the changing rules by which this development may be understood. Six identity tasks were presented to 60 infants divided into five age groups: 5, 7, 9, 12, and 15 months. Two objects were used in all tasks. In the first…

Content analysis in the manner of M. H. Nagy's 1948 study was used to explore facets of children's thoughts and feelings about death. Participants were 316 children aged 3-12 who resided in the Sydney Metropolitan Area. Subjects expressed their views on death in talking, writing, and drawing. It was found that all children progressed through three…

Children's developing concept of time is important in socialization, but a contradiction is implied in asking children to educate themselves for the future when both children and adults are aware of the threat of nuclear annihilation. The development of time concepts can be traced through infancy, preschool, elementary school and adolescence, and…

This paper deals with how the validity of a category describing a person's conception of a phenomenon is established. The presentation is confined to the relation between some categories of description and one interview protocol. The case described here is taken from an investigation into conceptions of political power. The description concerns…

Among the 12 documents selected for this annotated bibliography of documents and journal articles in the ERIC database is an expert's argument that the brain's multipath and multimodal capacities are ignored by educators. Another writer fears that the "back-to-basics" movement may have eclipsed the prominence earlier accorded to thinking…

Increase in sex-role knowledge represents an early stage of the development of sex role stereotypes in children, which is followed by a decrease in the extent of sex-role discrimination. This process is related to the acquisition of classificatory skills. Groups of children aged 4-10 years were tested for their sex role stereotypes and…

Meta-analysis techniques were used to analyze the effects of different types of aids to learning science concepts from textual materials. The studies analyzed dealt with aids for selecting the important information contained in written materials and aids for building internal connections among the parts of printed materials. Studies pertaining to…

The science learning cycle developed by Robert Karplus and others in the 1960's has been a useful model for many science teachers and researchers. This model stresses the use of structured inquiry to organize knowledge acquisition and problem solving. Recent research in the cognitive science tradition, however, has shown that learning and problem…

Pretests and posttests on the topic of evolution through natural selection were administered to students in a college nonmajors' biology course. Analysis of test responses revealed that most students understood evolution as a process in which species respond to environmental conditions by changing gradually over time. Student thinking differed…

The study examined the effectiveness of enhancing perceptual differentiation in the training of four developmentally delayed preschool children who were so low-functioning that they did not demonstrate oddity responding (ability to choose one distinct stimulus from a group of identical stimuli). Instead of the Arabic numerals used in the original…

Two experiments were conducted to test three hypotheses related to comprehension. The hypotheses were: that actions are harder to modify than states; that implications or inferences from modified concepts would also change in memory; and that propagation of modifications would be less likely to states than to actions. The first experiment tested…

The terms and concepts children used to explain their beliefs about computers before and after classroom exposure to microcomputers were studied to identify misconceptions about computers that could interfere with computer-based learning. Children in each of two classrooms at the Bank Street School for Children were interviewed individually on…