In educational settings, continuous assessment of the child's level of understanding is necessary to effectively utilize the principles of scaffolding and to create contexts that can advance the scientific reasoning of the child. In this article, we argue that a child's performance is a dynamic notion that is created by all elements in…

We examined how middle school students reason about results from a computer-simulated die-tossing experiment, including various representations of data, to support or refute an assumption that the outcomes on a die are equiprobable. We used students' actions with the software and their social interactions to infer their expectations and whether or…

To investigate the relationship between cognitive and social functioning, 20 Israeli individuals with HFASD aged 8-12 and 22 age, maternal education, and receptive vocabulary-matched preadolescents with typical development (TYP) came to the lab with a close friend. Measures of abstract reasoning, friendship quality, and dyadic interaction during a…

A theoretical model of person memory and judgment--the processes underlying the formation of person impressions--is presented. It incorporates both specific behaviors and abstract personality dispositions or behavioral tendencies. The model accounts for factors affecting recall of social information and interpersonal judgments and is applicable to…

Goals of the study, among others, were (1) to refine a system for assessing the developmental level of persuasive strategies, and (2) to test the hypothesis that children employ more advanced persuasive strategies when addressing unfamiliar rather than familiar persuasive targets (strangers v parents). (JMF)

The aims of this study were (1) to test the dyadic superiority hypothesis by comparing dyadic performance on a logical reasoning task with the performance of children working alone, and (2) to determine whether the incorrect child's compliance with the correct child was a major factor in the dyadic production of correct answers. (Author/DB)

This study showed that war does have an appeal to both men and women, but that appeal is different and is related to the set of moral concerns that are unique to each gender. To assess the different aspects of men's and women's attitudes towards war, a 48-item Likert-type scale was constructed and administered to 148 students. Results showed that…

Investigates whether children's use of reasoning differs in child-child and adult-child discussions of moral dilemmas. Supports Piaget's contention that moral discussions with peers feature a more spontaneous use of reasoning than do discussions with adults. (HOD)

Investigated how children's decisions about allocating money to story characters were affected by the relationship (friends versus strangers) among the characters. Children's rationales for their decisions showed that equality was the most salient principle for decisions at all ages and that older children provided rationales based on benevolence…

Studies children's justification of message choices as characteristics of their reasoning processes. Indicates that interpersonal reasoning increases in sophistication and complexity over the age groups studied and that females reason at a higher level than males. Situational influences on level of interpersonal reasoning were also found. (JMF)

The roles of impersonal (or abstract) and relational (or connected) modes of knowing in the experiences of young adults were studied, and the ways the two converge are described in this report of the post-college phase of a 7-year longitudinal study of the epistemological development of college students, i.e., their assumptions about the limits,…

Found that increases in cognitive complexity and construct system abstractness significantly related to the use of (1) a greater number of persuasive strategies; (2) more listener-adaptive persuasive strategies; and (3) formation of more complex and abstract impressions of interaction partners. (PD)