Investigates 55 6th grade students' conceptions of "invention and patent processes". Suggests that students have few or simplistic conceptions of invention and patent processes and prior exposure to invention instruction, or previous experiences with inventing did not appear to have an impact on students' conceptions of invention. (Contains 70…

Provides an overview of research on transfer, highlighting its main tenets. Looks at interviews of two grade 5 students learning about mathematical concepts regarding operations on positive and negative quantities. Focuses on how their learning is influenced by prior knowledge and experience. (Author/MM)

Reports on a study designed to develop and validate a framework for characterizing middle school students' thinking across four processes: describing data, organizing and reducing data, representing data, and analyzing and interpreting data. Results indicate that students progress through four levels of thinking within each statistical process.…

Introduces a special issue on the ways in which symbolic tools enable, mediate, and shape mathematical thinking while being themselves a product of these processes. (Author/MM)

Presents a cultural-developmental framework for the analysis of children's mathematics in collective practices and illustrates the heuristic value of the framework through the analysis of videotaped episodes drawn from a middle-school classroom. Discusses the promise and limitations of the framework as a method for furthering understanding of the…

Analyzes two classroom episodes guided by the assumption that thinking can be conceptualized as an activity of communication and learning can be regarded as modifying and extending one's discursive ways. Aims to uncover the ways in which the discursive uses of such new symbolic tools were interactively constructed by the students. Concludes that…

Discusses the misconceptions revealed by the teachers' answers and outlines more accurate answers and explanations based on established evidence and uses these to provide a more complete understanding of plate tectonic process and the structure of Earth. (Author/YDS)

Reports on the use of story-telling to develop children's ideas about the water-cycle. Shows that children remember abstract science ideas better when taught in a story format and that they can distinguish the real from the anthropomorphic. (Author/MM)

Six gerontology graduate students developed a model based on life-course concepts (time, human agency, context, and timing of lives) to explain relationships between Japanese immigrant mothers and their daughters. The process sharpened their knowledge of the concepts, provided real-life examples of them, and demonstrated connections among them.…

This study compared the spatial-geometrical abilities of 85 students (ages 5-13) with learning disabilities (LD) and 94 children without LD, matched for IQ and age. Generally, students with LD did not perform as well as same-aged students without LD, suggesting that LD students experience delayed development in this general spatial-cognitive…

Discusses how Thomas Kuhn's view of scientific development parallels Piaget's model of conceptual development in childhood. (Author/CCM)

Studies two children working in the context of specially developed computer microworlds with a teacher/researcher for approximately 45 minutes a week for 50 weeks over a two-year period. Indicates that the operations and unit types associated with the children's whole-number sequences did not interfere with the reorganization of their fractional…

Examined whether 5- and 6-year-olds understand that addition and subtraction cancel each other and whether this understanding is based on identity or quantity of addend and subtrahend. Found that children used inversion principle. Six- to eight-year-olds also used inversion and decomposition to solve a + b - (B+1) problems. Concluded that…

Describes a study of how much children know about the human skeleton and gives advice for teaching the topic more effectively. (Author/WRM)

Used a systematic interpretive analysis of preschoolers' spontaneous narratives over the school year to study the development of their conceptions of the person. Found that girls constructed a socially embedded and interdependent person who becomes increasingly individuated and self-consciously responsible. Boys created a separate and agonistic…