Based on an M.A. thesis (Mitler) submitted to the Department of Psychology, Michigan State University, and reported in part at the meetings of the Midwest Psychological Association (Chicago, May 3, 1968).

From the Series "Social Studies Education: The Elementary School -- Focus on Inquiry.

Research supported by a grant form the U.S. Office of Education, Bureau of Research

Portions of this paper were read at the annual convention of the Eastern Psychological Association, April 1967.

Fifty-five preschool children, ages three and four, used an Apple II microcomputer to learn reading readiness concepts of "above,""below,""left," and "right." Available during indoor play periods for three weeks at a nursery school on the Stanford University campus, the microcomputer was accepted…

Information about individuals' representations of problems was obtained from studies on reasoning and problem categorization. College students (N=62) participated in a study of the transition from concrete to formal reasoning using the pendulum and chemical yellow tasks. Over a 10-12 week period, 47 students participated in 10 training sessions on…

The learning machine described in this paper acquires concepts representable as conjunctive forms of the predicate calculus and behaviors representable as productions (antecedent-consequent pairs of such conjunctive forms): these concepts and behavior rules are inferred from sequentially presented pairs of examples by an algorithm that is probably…

The intent of this document is to provide answers to questions related to teaching the metric system. Topics covered include: (1) A Model for Developing Understanding and Skills in Measurement; (2) Metric Measurement Units; (3) SI Do's and Don'ts; (4) Examples of Everyday Uses of SI Measures; (5) Child Development and Learning to Measure; (6)…

The development of children's understanding of the permanence of various social roles was examined in 16 four- and 16 five-year-old children. A social role conservation battery consisting of 12 items on the permanence of self-identity, gender, child and sibling roles was given under three temporal conditions: the past (i.e., when you were a baby,…

The effects of university education in economics on students' conceptions of economic aspects of their everyday life were studied. A random sample of 15 beginninq students at the University of Goteborg, Sweden, were interviewed before and after the course. Ten questions were asked that were taken from the students' everyday life and brought out…

Acquisition of the basic concepts of mathematics such as matching, number and counting, sets and classifying, comparing, measuring, shape, space, and parts and wholes, may be followed by two types of activities. First, the child may subsequently be presented activities that allow for practice and generalization of those acquired concepts.…

Modeling the process of communication through fictive constructions of audience is as much a part of teaching writing as is imparting rules for grammar and organization. A historical review of rhetorical theory and the goals of writing instruction delineates the shift away from traditional, fuzzy conceptions of audience to more carefully…