Four experiments studied 4- to 6-year-old children's understanding of inferential reasoning as a source of knowledge. To assess understanding that knowledge of relevant premises leads to knowledge of the conclusion, children had to judge the knowledge of another person, who was presented to the child as being aware of two premises. (Author/BN)

A vignette procedure was used to elicit knowledge of delay of gratification strategies in 84 4-, 6-, and 8-year-old children. The 4-year-olds evinced minimal knowledge of effective delay strategies; 50% of 6-year-olds and 94% of 8-year-olds could describe at least one form of distractive strategy. (Author/BN)

This study investigated whether attention to either physical or social entities is linked to autistic development. Comparison of 15 children with autism with normally developing children matched for mental age found a strong correlation between joint attention and set-shifting in typically developing children but not those with autism. (Contains…

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,…

An ecological method was used to assess the patterns of goal-directed behaviors of eight children with autism and eight chronological and mental age comparable children with Down syndrome. Analysis of quantitative and qualitative behavior coding indicated that children with autism exhibited shorter and less overlapping goal-directed behaviors,…

Seventeen children (ages 5-7) with specific language impairment (SLI) were compared to age-matched (AM) and language-matched (LM) groups on measures of metalinguistic skill. SLI children's performance was worse than AM peers and indistinguishable from younger LM children, suggesting that morphological awareness is more closely allied to oral…

The Information Age has been shaping the conception of thinking in education through the capability of computerized problem solving, through the resulting application of the information processing model to human thinking, and through the theories emerging from other cognitive science research in metacognition, construction of knowledge, and…

To learn about teachers' conceptualization of memory strategy use, memory knowledge, and developmental changes in these skills, investigators administered a questionnaire to 59 teachers of children in kindergarten through sixth grades. The questionnaire included sections on strategy use, metamemory skills, and memory monitoring and control…

This paper briefly reviews research on tasks in knowledge-rich domains including developmental studies, work in artificial intelligence, studies of expert/novice problem solving, and information processing analysis of aptitude test tasks that have provided increased understanding of the nature of expertise. Particularly evident is the finding that…

Three major views of intelligence are compared and evaluated: the psychometric, the Piagetian, and the information-processing. The educational implications of each view for training content knowledge and intellectual skills are considered. How each view would approach training students in solving verbal analogies is discussed. (Author/BS)

Discusses the development of a mathematics attitude model guided by the analysis of mathematical life-history interviews, Vygotsky's developmental theories, and research on attitudes toward mathematics. Explores implications for curriculum planning and development. (Contains 36 references.) (MDH)

Explanations for memory development have tended to focus on acquistion of general strategies and metaknowledge. Recently, emphasis has been given to the knowledge base as a whole, including general world-knowledge and domain-specific knowledge and procedures. Evidence is presented from the memory development literature showing why strategies and…

Evaluated the effects of the processes of working alone and of working in pairs on 10th-grade students' performance of tasks involving comprehension and production of electrical diagrams. Sociocognitive interaction had positive effects on students' individual performances, and peer interaction favored the implementation of metacognitive…

Using five metamemory question types and the Counting Span Test (CST), this research investigated the effects of metamemory task demands, and the relationship of the amount of information one can hold in working memory to metamemory question performance. One hundred twenty kindergarten, first, third, and fifth grade children served as subjects.…

Tested 32 4-year-olds and 32 6-year-olds for free and cued recall following either play-and-remember or sort-and-remember instructions and assessed them for their metamemory of the efficacy of conceptual and perceptual sorting strategies. Younger children recalled more items under sort-and-remember, whereas no recall differences were found for the…