Presents a framework of developmental tasks which focuses on growth over the life span. Tasks include competence, sex role identity, capacity for meaningful relationships, independence, personal purpose, integrity, and acceptance of the world. Limitations of the approach and implications for counselors are discussed. (JAC)

Four experiments examined the development of negative priming (NP) in 3-5-year-old children using as a measure of children's executive function (EF) the dimensional change card sort (DCCS) task. In the NP version of the DCCS, the values of the sorting dimension that is relevant during the preswitch phase are removed during the postswitch phase.…

Investigates the knowledge of thematic and taxonomic relations of 15 children of 26 months and 24 children of 34 months. Both age groups were able to identify thematic matches. However, 34-month-olds were able to recognize a wider range of thematic associations than 26-month-olds. (RJC)

Suggests some difficulties and challenges in understanding and teaching Piaget's new theory. Outlines some differences between Piaget's new and standard theories, such as the diminished status of the emergent skills that mark the onset of concrete operational thinking and the perception of achievements in concrete operations as empirical…

Tests the claim to comprehensiveness of Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives by analyzing educational objectives of some freshmen orientation programs and those connected with human developmental tasks. It is concluded that the taxonomy should be enlarged with a fourth domain: actual induction into tasks for which students are being…

Used multiple baseline design with four 6-year-old Latino children to train in class inclusion through counting, feedback, and verbal reinforcers, and in English language skills (of benefit in their own right), over 5 months. Found that post-intervention gains in the two domains were significant and were stable over at least 4.5 months. (KB)

Two studies investigated the functional equivalence of three different scoring systems used to assess the child's ability to understand and carry out multiplicative classification tasks. All three scoring criteria produced reliable and homogeneous tests. Their factor matrices were similar, and the corresponding factor structures were invariant…

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.…

This is the first study to investigate experimentally how children come to learn mappings between novel phrasal forms and novel meanings: a central task in learning a language. Two experiments are reported. In both studies 5- to 7-year-old children watched a short set of video clips depicting objects appearing in various ways. Each scene was…

The effects of instruction in the Piacceleration Program (PXL), a hands on mastery-based program of instruction in Piagetian skills, on the acquisition of skills of classification, seriation, and conservation were studied with 28 Head Start students of Hispanic origin and 28 comparisons. PXL students did perform better on these skills. (SLD)

To examine how young children learn to read new words, we asked preschoolers (N = 115, mean age 4 years, 8 months) to learn and remember novel spellings that made sense based on letter names (e.g. TZ for "tease") and spellings that were visually distinctive but phonetically inappropriate. Children who were more knowledgeable about letter names…