The heterogeneity among children with learning disabilities still represents a barrier and a challenge in their conceptualization. Although a dimensional approach has been gaining support, the categorical approach is still the most adopted, as in the recent fifth edition of the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders." The…

The division of cognitive labor is fundamental to all cultures. Adults have a strong sense of how knowledge is clustered in the world around them and use that sense to access additional information, defer to relevant experts, and ground their own incomplete understandings. One prominent way of clustering knowledge is by disciplines similar to…

Studies of concept formation in infancy have demonstrated that certain experimental settings can elicit spontaneous behavior from infants which has been called "sorting" or "object grouping". This study pursues the issue of early sorting with infants as young as 6 months, and with a broader range of stimuli than has been used…

Results of three investigations of the development of word definitions indicated that younger childrens' definitions, including use or lack of use of superordinate categorical terms, fell short of adult informativeness, while, by age 10, children generally met such criteria in their definitions. (Author/CB)

A grouping task revealed a chronological progression: color and form determined the 4-year-old children's grouping about equally; form dominated in the 5-year-olds; and 9-year-olds grouped primarily by conceptual attributes. Performance on a memory task showed the developmental shift from color to form to concept, while cued recall showed…

This study examined the issue of how groups of students attempting to solve problems can be taught to consider moral aspects of the problem at a mature level. Classes in Swiss cantons (N=42) were given one of three different moral problems. Each class was divided into eight groups. The three treatments were: (1) provision of additional background…

The present study investigated the relationship between developmental shifts in the organization of materials and developmental changes in deliberate strategy use. Second- and fourth-grade children were presented with clusterable sort/recall lists representing the factorial combinations of high and low inter-item association and high and low…

Research on 128 children is presented as evidence of the superiority of a new clustering measure (X) over a more traditional "chance clustering" measure (sigma) as a means of organizing material to be learned to facilitate recall. X is shown to meet three criteria for a measure of a developmental process: X is more highly correlated with recall…

During socialization, individuals begin to understand increasingly broader and more abstract units of personal and social reality. Subjects (N=97) ranging in age from 13 to late middle age completed a linguistic task in which they could impose higher order conceptions on lower order descriptions by identifying different level similarities within…

Using cross classifiable pictures, this study assessed taxonomic and thematic clustering in free recall in 240 children, ages seven and ten. The effects of both free and constrained test conditions and developmental, ethnic, and socioeconomic differences, were examined. (BS)

A study focused on how the writer's knowledge of the language and use of a prewriting strategy for planning ideas affect the quality and efficiency of the writing. Three hypotheses were developed about how knowledge and strategy might influence writing performance: (1) independence (predicts that knowledge and strategy will independently improve…

It was hypothesized that the cognitive structures which underlie performance on class-inclusion tasks also underlie reading comprehension of the stated or inferred main idea of a paragraph, and that performance on three-dimensional class-inclusion tasks developmentally precedes performance on two-dimensional class-inclusion tasks. Ten kindergarten…

This study was designed (1) to determine differences in classificatory skills of low socioeconomic status children under intervention and non-intervention conditions; (2) to determine differences in classification skills of bilingual, biliterate, and monolingual students; and (3) to study differences in classificatory skills as a function of age.…

Free recall, cued recall, and clustering performance of fourth grade lower socioeconomic black and white children is studied under four conditions of teaching: random presentation, random presentation plus instruction, blocked presentation, and blocked presentation with instruction of categorically related list. Results indicate that both recall…