In a study of spatial orientation, 40 boys and 40 girls from kindergarten and first grade placed a series of objects in front, behind, and beside themselves, and in front, behind, and beside other objects. Some objects had distinguishable front and back sides; others lacked such features. Placements were highly consistent within and across…

Two concepts predominate in studies of spatial invasion: territoriality (personalization and defense of a fixed spatial area) and personal space (a portable area surrounding the individual, which is responsive to environmental change). Spatial invasions were carried out by occupying a marked seat (invade condition), and adjacent seat (adjacent…

This study examined the effect of grouping teachers and students by conceptual level (CL) upon the teachers' information handling behavior. Twenty secondary school teachers were divided into two groups of 10 HCL and 10 LCL teachers according to their scores of the Paragraph Completion Test. Forty pairs of sixth graders were formed, each pair…

A previous study by Begg and Pavio found that subjects presented with concrete sentences were able to detect subsequent changes in meaning better than changes in wording. In contrast, with abstract sentences, wording changes were detected with greater facility than were changes in meaning. The present study assesses the effect of comprehension on…

A new philosophy for science and technology is initiated in this paper for educational purposes. Cattell's theory of fluid and crystallized intelligence is analyzed. Science is described as a loose process of rejecting conjectures with temporarily accepted emerging ones used as alternative ways of explaining phenomena. The emerging conjectures…

A method of reading instruction is discussed in this paper. By helping the child to develop mental pictures of what he reads he can better retain the meaning of the sentence as he deciphers the more difficult words. The non-reader can lose the essence of a sentence because he may become too involved in decoding the sentence. A procedure on how to…

Teacher editions of four basal reading series used in the first, fourth, and sixth grades were analyzed to determine the extent of inclusion and explanation of the levels of questioning. Questions from the first two, middle two, and last two stories in each of the teacher editions were analyzed. All teacher editions examined recognized the…

Training sessions for the development of active critical thinking skills with the aim of improving the quality of student decision making prepares them for a future in a rapidly changing society. (JD)

Examples are given illustrating a facet of early learning involving insights into abstract thinking. Several learning theories examined fail to account for this phenomenon. (MP)

Reports a study involving 35 learning-disabled boys attending full-time remedial schools and 35 matched normal achievers to investigate whether learning-disabled children differ from normal achievers in terms of logical thought and whether they exhibit decalages in their acquisition of Piagetian concepts. (BD/BR)

Available from: British Medical Journal, 1172 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02134. In order to determine whether Central Nervous System irradiation effects intellectual abilities, 28 children in remission at least 2 years after completing chemotherapy for acute lymphoblastic leukemia were assessed on standardized psychological tests…

Describes steps involved in the construction of a 15-item test to measure formal reasoning in junior and senior high school students. From analysis, the author concludes that the test has face, convergent, and factorial validities. (CP)

A pretest-posttest research design was used with 104 first-grade children to determine if discrimination and classifactory activities would affect transition from preoperational to concrete stages. Findings showed the experimental group exhibited significantly greater transition than did the control group. (CP)

The relationship between a cognitive style variable, field-dependence-independence, and instructional treatments that differed in two dimensions of discovery learning, level of guidance and level of abstraction, was investigated with 116 prospective elementary teachers. As predicted, field-independent students did better with minimum guidance,…

This is the third in a sequence of three papers describing an investigation of fifth graders' ability to learn to distinguish between valid and fallacious inferences from simple conditional premises. This paper presents the research design and results. (MN)