This document presents ALERT, a substance abuse primary prevention program for use with students in grades four, five, and six. The ALERT program is described as promoting higher order thinking skills since each lesson is correlated with Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives; as providing opportunities for cooperative learning and for…

The perception of death gradually develops in a child's mind, reaching maturity at about 8 or 9 years of age. A mature death concept usually means a definition which includes the perception of death as a natural process, its finality, its irreversibility, and its universality. A study was undertaken to improve knowledge about the death concept.…

Implemented in an elementary school with a majority of Hispanicc students in a low-income community of a large midwest city, this practicum aimed to aid primary grade teachers understand the importance of self-esteem in the development of primary grade students. Practicum goals were to: (1) provide teachers with information about self-esteem to…

The purpose of this study was to determine the level of reasoning of a convenience sample of all seventh through twelfth grade students (N=156) in a consolidated school district in rural Arkansas prior to the introduction of a thinking program in which logical thinking is one component. Four research questions were investigated: (1) What…

Over the past two decades, theorists and researchers in cognitive structural developmental psychology have begun to investigate the social processes that impact upon individual cognitive growth. Studies have focused on how interactional processes lead to cognitive development but not on how the interactional processes are formed. This paper…

The design and architecture of two user-controlled, computer-based problem analysis environments in classical mechanics are discussed. In the expert-like environment, the user analyzes problems according to a hierarchical concept schema consistent with how experts analyze novel problems in physics. In the second environment, the user searches a…

One approach to the study of cognitive processes highlights the distinctions between expert and novice problem solvers. This approach attempts to discover how experts and novices differ in the way they organize, retain and use domain related knowledge. It appears to some that what is learned from expert-novice research can help teachers to teach…

This investigation examined the relationship between problem solving ability and the criteria used to decide whether two classical mechanics problems could be solved similarly. The investigators began by comparing experts and novices on a similarity judgment task and found that experts predominantly relied on the problems' deep structure in…

Examined were effects of advance organizer (AO) instruction on acquisition of conservation concepts in 3- and 4-year-olds. Participants were 28 children who were equally divided into experimental and control groups, pretested, and found to be nonconservers. A sequence of two AO lessons and related learning activities was presented to the…

Systematic observations of thousands of high school students in the California Mentally Gifted Minors/Gifted and Talented Education programs identified five principles underlying the development of high level thinking skills in this population: (1) Exceptional performance on any criterion requires mutually reinforcing antecedents, the effects of…

Responding to recent advances in developmental and cognitive science research on knowledge acquisition, this report presents a theoretical framework for analyzing cognitive development as a process of learning. The first section summarizes three developmental characteristics recognized in both the Piagetian and the quantita experimental tradition:…

Baumeister's (1968) hypothesis that mentally retarded children exhibit depressed levels of performance and greater intra-individual variability when compared to intellectually non-handicapped children of similar chronological age was investigated. Eight 10-year-old educable mentally retarded boys and 16 non-handicapped boys, matched by either…

To investigate young children's understanding of metaphorical language, 90 chidren from preschool to third grade were read stories ending with metaphorical sentences of varying degrees of difficulty--sentences representing more or less predictable story outcomes and differing in the complexity and explicitness of their figures of speech. After…

This study attempted to explain the findings of classical studies about young children's classification ability, namely that young children: (1) categorize on the basis of perceptual or concrete properties, (2) classify in a linear, nonhierarchical manner, and (3) use inconsistent criteria for classification. The study further proposed that…

This paper focuses on the ways in which nonparental significant adults affect adolescents' lives. Section 1 provides an overview of the literature regarding nonparental adults and their impact on adolescents. The concentration is on role models and significant adults. Section 2 explores the shift in developmental theory to an interactionist…