Reports results of two experiments to test recognition decisions of increasing difficulty among preschool children. Increasing levels of difficulty were perceptual identity, common object-class, and either taxonomic category or complementary pair formation. (Author/DB)

Teachers need a liberal arts background to understand what they are teaching and why they are teaching it. (Author/JD)

Experiments on the cognitive and perceptual development of three- to seven-year-old Soviet children are described, especially the work of L. A. Venger, N. N. Poddyakov, and D. B. El'Konin. Visual-action and visual-image thinking are illustrated. (GDC)

Observation of practices in V. V. Davydov's laboratory school suggests that students proceed from concrete example to abstract generalization--rather than from abstract to concrete, as Davydov has claimed. (GDC)

Children's learning of consumer economics concepts in two types of preschool teaching conditions was compared. Children in the Ausubelian program (high proportion of teacher-directed learning activities) achieved a significantly higher level of performance than did children in the Piagetian program (high proportion of child-directed activities.)…

Play was a significant predictor of success on all three measures of achievement. Socioeconomic status and sex appeared to have little influence on the prediction of achievement. Dramatic play had the most significant impact. (Author)

Discusses parent-child interactions in which the content of television programing appears as explicit subject matter. Examines ways in which a child's development may be affected by these parent-child interactions. (JMF)

Although some physical education curricula in elementary schools can be classified by theoretical construct, most are a combination of constructs. Such constructs include cognitive, traditional, developmental, integrative, and acurricular forms. (JN)

Space and shape, estimating and measuring, and number are viewed as the three strands of mathematics that come together as a child develops mathematically. Five cognitive/mathematical levels of development, labeled discrimination, order, application, operation, and estimation, are identified and discussed. (MP)

Reviews research on the nonauditory effects of noise on human behavior and health: performance, interpersonal behavior, annoyance, cognitive development, and mental and physical health. (EF)

Investigated whether a preschool intervention program for children from single-parent households could be effective in establishing the conditions appropriate for allowing the child to recover from the harmful consequences of divorce and limited adult-child interaction. (Author/DB)

Investigates the cognitive functioning of 106 college freshmen using six paper-pencil Piagetian-based tasks. Results show that only 25 percent of the freshmen tested were reasoning at a formal level. (HM)

The construct of general intelligence is discussed in the context of factor models, differential validity of tests, Piagetian tasks, heritability, social class, and race. The general factor is an abstraction resulting from genes, environmental pressures, and neural structures involved in cognitive or intellectual human behavior. (Author/RD)

Investigates differences between adolescents and older adults in their explanations of linguistic metaphors. Adults displayed a synthesizing, integrative perspective, while adolescents displayed an analytic perspective in their explanation of metaphors. (Author/SS)

The Wickens release from proactive interference (RIP) short-term memory technique was used to study encoding with functional categories by 7-, 10-, and 19-year-old male and female subjects. (CM)