This article was given as a keynote address to the 2009 conference of the European Association for the Teaching of Academic Writing (EATAW), 30 June to 2 July, at Coventry University, UK. It draws on experiences at Queen Mary, University of London, of developing a "writing in the disciplines" initiative and of working towards…

The persistence of the constructivist agenda within learning and developmental theory suggests that underneath the seemingly disparate views of Piagetian, socioculturalist, and ecological perspectives lie some unifying concepts that find their mutual expression in constructivism. The paper contends that semiotics provides the conceptual means to…

This study investigates the ability of 13-month-old infants to use objects of varying degrees of realism in symbolic play and the genera1ization of this ability across different scene content. The effects of order of presentation of the task and of the behavioral coding scheme on the assessment of those abilities were also examined. Thirty male…

Over recent years, various theories have arisen to explain and predict cognitive development in mathematics education. We focus on an underlying theme that recurs throughout such theories: a fundamental cycle of growth in the learning of specific concepts, which we frame within broader global theories of individual cognitive growth. Our purpose is…

To investigate task performance and the use of private speech and to examine the effects of a cognitive training approach, 30 learning disabled (LD) and 30 nonLD Ss (7 to 8 years old) were given a 17 piece wooden puzzle rigged so that it could not be completed correctly. Six variables were measured: (1) proportion of private speech that was task…

An assessment of recent trends in developmental research examined all articles published in the periodical "Child Development" from 1967-1983. Of the articles that were included in the "Child Development Abstracts and Bibliography" in the same period, 200 articles from each year of the period were randomly selected for…

Education is not a respected profession because educational practice is not based on a solid body of scientific research and theory. Education is at a prescientific or early scientific stage of development. Attempts by educators to base their practice on behavioral science fail because behaviorism encompasses only a narrow segment of human…

This document describes the Conceptual Learning and Development (CLD) model of concept formation. According to the CLD analysis, a single concept is learned in the following successive levels of attainment: concrete, identity, classification, and formal. The four levels are considered applicable to concepts that are defined (or could be defined)…

This paper is a reflection of the preparation of the Psychology of Mathematics Education Panel (PME26) that discuss the issue of "learning from learners." What it implies to be a learner is formulated in order to reflect upon the way teachers and/or researchers learn from learners. The idea of conceptualizing the notion of "learning from learners"…

The science learning cycle developed by Robert Karplus and others in the 1960's has been a useful model for many science teachers and researchers. This model stresses the use of structured inquiry to organize knowledge acquisition and problem solving. Recent research in the cognitive science tradition, however, has shown that learning and problem…

This essay explores the characteristic failure of traditional formal educational methods to teach the learner much which will remain for long in that person's memory. It discusses a physiological model of learning/remembering and compares it to some other models and metaphors of cognition. It distinguishes between learning and remembering, and…

The paper presents a description of and a rationale for a single-stroke LOGO package for physically handicapped students. The package is intended to promote cognitive decision making via a simplified single-stroke keyboard approach. Sequential behaviors of nonhandicapped students learning to use the system are described. Physically handicapped…

Eleven kindergarten children, nine of whom had been identified at risk, were administered tasks involving word and sentence reading with and without pictures, writing of words and a sentence, print awareness, and book handling skills. Results suggested that children expect words to be a label for pictures, that articles and prepositions are not…

The paper describes an experiment in which 52 deaf children (7-19 years old) and 36 normal hearing children (7-16 years old) were given several Piagetian conservation tasks to determine if the conventional instructions are the basis for conservation failure in deaf children and to examine the order in which deaf Ss acquired various forms of…

This study investigated the effects of stimulus presentation rate on primacy-recency effects in children. A modification of the Digit Span task used in the Binet and Wechsler intelligence scales provided the basic memory task administered to 56 male school children in grades kindergarten, second, fourth, and sixth. The specific design required…