The major components of playfulness in kindergarten children are physical, social, and cognitive spontaneity, manifest joy, and sense of humor. Children who are highly playful also show high scores in divergent and creative thinking. Piaget postulated that after the age of 7 or 8 this quality is replaced by assimilating the objective facts of the…

This summary report, one of a series of documents on the evaluation of the University of Western Ontario Preschool Project, reviews studies (conducted as part of the project) of preschool children to determine why disadvantaged children fail in school and to discover if compensatory education activates and maintains the children's cognitive…

This paper reports on an experiment undertaken to delineate more clearly the relationship between the naming process in children and certain aspects of the environment which may play a role in that process. The investigation concerned the effect of manipulation and of object novelty on naming. Sixteen children, ten girls and six boys, ranging in…

Comprehension of reversible active and passive sentences was studied with 48 Japanese children between the ages of two and six. Four types of sentences were constructed using passive and active structures and two word orders: subject-object-verb (SOV) and object-subject-verb (OSV). The basic order of elements in a simple sentence in Japanese is…

This paper describes part of a larger study dealing with syntax and semantics of the child's early speech about motion and location. It suggests that goal, defined as the point at which a motion ends and a resulting locative state begins, is the organizing principle for the semantics of motion and location. The data presented here are from two…

This paper provides an overview of a project (now in its formative stages) to develop Head Start measures of program effects on children 3 to 7 years of age. The program approach is distinctive in emphasizing evaluation of all aspects of children's development that may affect their overall competence in reflecting the concerns, views, and values…

The educational significance of wrong answers on multiple choice tests was investigated in over 4,000 subjects, aged 7 to 20. Gorham's Proverbs Test--which requires the interpretation of a proverb sentence--was administered and repeated five months later. Four questions were addressed: (1) what can the pattern of answer choice, across age, using…

This study compared the developmental levels of spatial concepts in children from three different environments in the United States. Matched groups of twenty 10-year-olds were selected from a rural Appalachian community, a middle-class suburban community, and a lower-middle-class urban community, and administered a Piaget-based map drawing task.…

Semilingualism is discussed as a sociolinguistic concept and is viewed as a mediating variable when the society reproduces the class structure and vocational structure of suppressed minorities. A Finnish group of immigrant children in Sweden is the minority considered. It was found that the longer the Finnish children were educated in Finnish, the…

This set of five reports and one manual is a product of the Mathemagenic Activities Program (MAP) for early childhood education of the University of Georgia Follow Through Program. Based on Piagetian theory, the MAP provides sequentially structured sets of curriculum materials and processes that are designed to continually challenge children in…

The document provides the revised curriculum guide for Project SOCRATES, a program designed for academically gifted students in grades 4 and 5. The guide is organized according to the project's four goal areas: development of creative thinking, for casting, reasoning, and planning and decision making. Under each goal are listed objectives and…

A study is presented that considers the narrator's knowledge of conventional schemata for stories and the cognitive factors which seem to be affecting the selection and organization of material for narration. Children ranging in age from 3 years 10 months to 7 years 4 months were asked to watch a video tape cartoon and recount the story to a…

One hundred and twenty kindergarten and second grade children from three different language environments were given a perceptual matching test and a verbal communication test to examine the relationship between language and cognitive performance. The object of the study was to focus on the cognitive processing demands imposed by the linguistic…

This handbook was prepared for use in any classroom to aid the student in understanding how to become a better learner and how to learn meaningfully. This program is based on Ausubel's cognitive learning theory which places emphasis on the differences between meaningful learning and rote learning. To acquire knowledge meaningfully means that the…

The paper examines George Herbert Mead's account of the individual's relation to the physical world. Mead (1863-1931) taught social psychology and philosophy at the University of Chicago from 1893-1931 and is best known for his theory of self. This theory maintains that the self is formed in a particular historical context and that it includes…