Students often perform arithmetic using rigid problem-solving strategies that involve left-to-right-calculations. However, as students progress from arithmetic to algebra, entrenchment in rigid problem-solving strategies can negatively impact performance as students experience varied problem representations that sometimes conflict with the order…

For students to advance beyond arithmetic, they must learn how to attend to the structure of math notation. This process can be challenging due to students' left-to-right computing tendencies. Brackets are used in mathematics to indicate precedence but can also be used as superfluous cues and perceptual grouping mechanisms in instructional…

Mathematics is the study of structure but students think of math as solving problems according to rules. Students can learn procedures, but they often have trouble knowing when to apply learned procedures, especially to problems unlike those they trained with. In this study, the authors rely on the psychological mechanism of perceptual learning…

Background: The ability to think analogically is central to the process of learning and understanding reality and there is a broad consensus among researchers that we can improve this ability. Immigrants who have emigrated from developing to developed countries tend to experience tremendous challenges in their early years as immigrants. Their…

Everyday environments, even small regions within reach, vary dramatically in terms of material composition. Adapting one's manual behavior to such transitions can be considered to be an important element of skilled action. To investigate the origins of this ability, we presented 8-month-olds (n=24) and 10-month-olds (n=24) hard or soft objects on…

This study examines the ability of 20 5- and 6-year-old children to determine whether an inference could reliably be made or whether a problem was undecidable. Children were given a random series of 8 decidable and 16 undecidable problems in which they had to determine in which of 2 houses a target character could be found. There were two…

Examines children's understanding of what variables and relations are important in problem structures, and their use of these variables and relations in problem solving. (HOD)

The purpose of this study was to determine if intervention instruction in encoding processes affects novice teacher problem solving ability in educational contexts of varying levels of complexity. It sought to determine the effects of intervention training in nine specific encoding processes, prerequisite to effective problem solving, on novice…

Studies the effects of perceptual salience on performance in problems requiring the coordination of information. Subjects were groups of children, younger adults, and older adults. For each of the age groups, those problems containing the most salient information were solved faster and more accurately than problems containing the least salient…

Recent studies have shown perceptual instability to be related to visual creativity as reflected in career choice. In general, those who display greater perceptual instability perceive themselves to be more creative and tend to choose careers related to visual creativity, regardless of their gender. To test the hypothesis that field independents…

Discusses variables related to task performance in the solution of the water-level problem, where subjects were asked to indicate the water surface orientation in a tilted vessel. Subjects ages 7 to 15 years participated. Suggests that field effects and the kind of rules in use contribute to the differences in performance, which can be shown even…

A longitudinal study followed perceptual and problem solving skill development in children (2-11 years old) with severe problems of oral and written language acquisition: 15 hearing impaired (HI) Ss; 11 children with a hearing loss that alone did not account for their language problem, who presented in addition so-called "learning problems" (HIL…

This paper describes two experiments in which children in grades 1, 3, and 5 were given three kinds of spatial perspective-taking problems to solve as quickly as they could: (1) C problems, solvable only by computation (that is, noting which features of a particular object array were closest to another observer in order to estimate how the array…

Investigates the belief that caregivers' sensitive and contingent behavior is closely related to children's perceived control by analyzing the interactions between mothers and their 3 1/2- to 4 1/2-year-old children during a problem-solving task. (HOD)

A five-step model intervention called "Sensational Thinking," which incorporates readiness, reception, reflection, revelation, and re-creation activities, was evaluated with four kindergarten classes. Experimental groups showed increased creativity over control groups in solving paradoxical problems. The study is seen as supporting the premise…