Previous research of classroom teaching and learning revealed that students have critical misconceptions about how plants get their food and that these misconceptions remain unchanged despite instruction using activities in the Science Curriculum Improvement Study (SCIIS) unit on producers. Because the experimental sequence described in SCIIS is…

Although the critical thinking movement is a significant trend in both philosophy and teaching, there are certain points of view within the movement which have the potential for undermining its success. One of these developments, conceptual scheme talk, is contradictory to any intelligible notion of critical thinking. Believers in this concept…

The "contextual hypothesis" of French and Brown (1977) concerning children's acquisition of temporal terms was tested. French and Brown claimed that it would be impossible for children to learn the meaning of temporal terms except by hearing them used in contexts where they referred to already known sequences, and further proposed that the terms…

This project had three major goals: (1) investigate the extent to which introductory physics students misuse or misunderstand formulas; (2) catalogue the typical ways in which they do this; and (3) begin the larger task of identifying key types of knowledge that successful problem solvers use to give formulas meaning. Exploratory interviews and…

A cognitive training strategy was employed to investigate the nature of development in children's concepts of death. Subjects ranging in age from 3 to 11 years and attending Jewish-affiliated preschools participated in the study. Measures of verbal concept formation, abstract reasoning, general intelligence, and ability to conserve were…

Examines the prediction that the ordinal property of natural number symbols is more easily learned by preschoolers than the cardinal property of natural number symbols. (Author/ED)

Described is the use of praying mantises as organisms to illustrate the concept of predator. (PEB)

From the moral development scale scoring manual, Kohlberg's published works, and the research of his collaborators and others, an analysis was made of the evidence supporting the hierarchy of moral reasoning and the claims put forth for the cross-cultural universality of the cognitive-developmental theory. (Author/CS)

A three-year study of student attitudes, underway during the Cambodian incursion and the Kent State University and Jackson State College shootings, picked up a change, pervasive, if temporary, in attitudes responsive to those events and compared them with attitudes measured a year before and after. (JH)

An investigation was carried out to ascertain how 700 children aged seven to 15 (half boys and half girls), acquired the ability to define certain moral concepts, how they decided on whether an action was right or wrong, and what influenced the acquisitional process. (Author)

Preschool children were trained to acquire transitivity, conservation, and class inclusion of length via feedback to their judgments. Feedback was found to facilitate the learning of all three concepts. (ST)

Based on five working papers developed as part of the Program of Studies in Nonformal Education at Michigan State University, this monograph suggests a conceptual framework for analysis of rural development and nonformal education and the relationship which exists between them. The four sections of this monograph are titled and subtitled as…

One of the most typical ways in which people learn is by inferring general rules from examples. In recent years, significant progress has been made toward understanding how learning from examples can occur, determining when it does occur, and identifying conditions that promote it. This paper reviews these results and then suggests a program of…

The role of imagery is assessed in verbal concept identification and evidence is found that some concepts can be coded as images. (Author/AM)

Children's fiction books can be used to develop concepts of number, shapes, words, etc. (JH)