Parents and counselors must learn communication techniques which encourage expression of feelings and at the same time indicate adult approval or disapproval of the child's expressed behavior. Children must be helped to discriminate between a disapproving act and the doer". (CJ)

Four studies compared static versus dynamic presentations of examples and nonexaples of the concepts "diagonal" and "conves," with nonhandicapped preschoolers, mildly handicapped primary students, and severely handicapped adults. Ss taught with a dynamic presentation learned the discrimination in significantly fewer trials, with performance either…

When asked to identify "chairs" from a series of pictures and order them as best examples, adults used contextual clues about the objects' function in their judgments. However, contextual function clues caused children's judgment to change greatly. Results are discussed in relation to theories of concept formation in children. (MSE)

Results from the data analysis show that children learn mathematical concepts for clear cases, and that an analysis of attributes common to examples of a given concept is not a prerequisite to concept formation. The protocol findings provide information as to why this may be happening. (Author/PN)

Eighty-two educable and trainable mentally retarded children (6-18 years old) judged whether a series of visual stimuli matched a standard. With each judgment the investigator verbalized "right" or "wrong" and then provided full feedback of cue similarities and differences that supported each judgment. Trained Ss exhibited total intradimensional…

Reports effects of context that are entirely perceptual. Visual discrimination was enhanced when line segments were flashed in a region that was perceived as a figure. Discrimination was substantially degraded when the same region was seen as ground although the physical stimulus remained identical throughout figure-ground reversals. (Author/JN)

Discrimination learning set performance was examined in preschool children as a function of age and number of trials per problem. Subjects were 120 children three, four, five, and six years old. (MP)

Two groups of mentally retarded children (MA: 4 to 8 years) were pretrained using two different methods. It was predicted that shift performance of the two groups trained to use different strategies would resemble those of two different developmental levels. (MP)