One of the issues facing educators is the increasing number of nontraditional students appearing in the college classroom. Recent conceptualizations of adult reasoning have suggested that there are qualitative differences in reasoning from young to late adulthood. The objective of this study was to examine cognitive differences rather than…

To identify the characteristics of early intervention programs most predictive of growth in participants' competencies, a comparison was made of the effects of three different Iowa Head Start programs on teachers, mothers, and children. Three agencies with home-based, three with center-based, and three with combination programs from rural areas…

The present study attempts to move beyond the social address research design to investigate the process by which socioeconomic status (SES) exerts its influence on parenting practices. Of particular interest were maternal practices related to cognitive outcomes in children. The conceptual model of the study was based on the reliable finding that…

Noting the lack of definitive information about teaching thinking skills and how they are implemented throughout the year or how they are coordinated among subject areas and articulated along grade levels, this booklet is intended to provide school districts with a successful plan for developing a comprehensive thinking program for grades K-12.…

Concerned with a high failure rate in computer programming courses, two studies were undertaken to discover if two individual cognitive styles--"analytic" (formal thought) and "heuristic" (concrete or pre-operational thought)--were predictors of performance in a beginning computer programming course. To appropriately measure…

When a person encounters a problem, the character, form, and content of his or her response provides psychologists with useful and interesting information about processes of challenge and their relationship to intellectual development. In essence, challenge is a developing relationship that is defined on the one hand by objective factors (a person…

This study focused on misconceptions related to light and vision. Researchers administered diagnostic tests about light, vision, and color before and after instruction to 227 fifth-grade students over a 2-year period. They also conducted 11 clinical interviews. The tests and interviews revealed that almost all students shared certain…

The purpose of this study was to determine how children at different ages understand the concept of temperature, examining particularly the logicomathematical aspects of the concept. In doing so, three developmental approaches were compared: (1) Piaget's structuralist approach; (2) Siegler's rule assessment approach; and (3) Anderson and…

A technique to teach cognitive skills to directly facilitate abstract and rational thinking is described. Based on George Kelly's theory of personal constructs, his Role Construct Repertory Test has students construe similarities and differences among important course concepts rather than provide individual definitions or examples of those…

The teaching of decision-making, problem-solving, and higher-order thinking skills is necessary to ensure adaptability to our world of accelerated change. Living skills in the technology and information age will include the understanding and application of higher level thinking skills, which will be the educational "basics" of tomorrow.…

To investigate the relationship between the intellectual maturity of college students and evidence of rhetorical maturity in their writing, 70 student essays were evaluated on three independent measures: W. G. Perry's scale of intellectual development, P. G. Diederich's scale of writing competence, and a measure of audience awareness based on the…

The areas of knowledge, abilities, and attitudes essential to bilingual, English-as-a-second-language, and mainstream teachers in developing the academic competence of limited-English-speaking students are outlined. The areas of knowledge include linguistic and applied linguistic concepts, reading and writing processes, instructional resources,…

This paper discusses various educational strategies for interactive videodisc design that were derived through scanning, synthesizing, and simplifying implications from a wide variety of learning theories. Four initial assumptions about videodisc technology are presented: (1) videodisc systems are more likely to be effective if learning theories…

A three-phase investigation of memory and metacognitive development was conducted to learn how teachers structure children's study activities to develop memory and metacognitive skills. In the first study, observations of 69 teachers of kindergarten through sixth grade classes showed a peak in strategy suggestions at the second and third grades.…

The hypothesis that variation in accessibility of categorical knowledge affects its use as an organizational device was tested in this experiment using 36 second graders and 36 fifth graders from a middle-class community within San Diego, California. The students memorized each of two lists of words that differed in category representativeness.…