How people see the world, even how they research it, is influenced by beliefs. Some beliefs are conscious and the result of research, or at least amenable to research. Others are largely invisible. They may feel like "common knowledge" (though myth, not knowledge), unrecognized premises that are part of the surrounding culture. As we…

Involving children three and four years of age, studies examined the basis for the difficulty of discriminating between left-right orientations of a shape in standard two-choice task. It was concluded that difficulty of left-right judgments lies in the cognitive demands of the task and is to be understood in the same terms as other problems in…

Questions concerning the ontogeny of the planning process and its role in the regulation of behavior have been markedly absent from the literature. The present study examines the planning done during solitary play by middle-class children from four public nursery schools in Athens, Greece. One hundred preschool children in five age groups (42, 48,…

First-, third-, fifth-, and sixth-grade children were administered 20 relational reasoning problems in which they had to deduce the possible sizes of one item relative to two others on the basis of a visual comparison and a written clue. Dramatic differences were observed between fifth- and sixth-grade children. Corrective feedback improved…

Developmental differences in summaries of expository texts were examined for fourth and sixth grade students in two experiments. Experiment 1 used texts that had a description content structure whereas Experiment 2 texts had a thesis/evidence content structure. Manipulation of the presence or absence of the topic sentence allowed the examination…

This study of 114 children between seven and nine years used a procedure for directly observing child-produced and experimenter-produced strategies to examine the transitional period of strategy development. Findings revealed gradual changes in children's ability to produce, and to benefit from, a strategy of selective attention. (RH)

Examines the relation between attention to target and context information and target recall in an incidental learning task for children and adults. Results support a distinction between context-interactive and context-independent situations and suggest that the attentional patterns that are efficient for memory may differ with the kind of…

Assesses the degree of difficulty parents attribute to specific socialization tasks; explores the relation between parents' perceived difficulty and children's perceived and actual competence in these two domains; and determines whether the ease or difficulty of these child rearing tasks, as perceived by parents, varies as a function of the…

Three studies of children at two developmental levels were made to assess subjects' understanding of the verbal terms "easy" (to do) and "hard" (to do). Such understanding was studied in the context of statements about personal competence at depicted activities. Behavioral criteria of levels of understanding were employed;…