Computational thinking (CT) has emerged as a key topic of interest in K-12 education. Children that are exposed at an early age to STEM curriculum, such as computer programming and computational thinking, demonstrate fewer obstacles entering technical fields. Increased knowledge of programming and computation in early childhood is also associated…

The relative importance of spatial-position as a memory aid in a block pattern reproduction task was investigated by analyzing the object-selection and object-placement strategies of 69 nursery school children. Subjects were given a task modeled on Piaget's assessment of Static Reproductive Images and Action that had been modified into a…

The processing of mental structures in perception appears to be serial, in that viewers can fill in missing parts from an impoverished stimulus following a top down process. To investigate the effects of unfamiliarity, complexity, and legibility on object and layout perception of unfamiliar stimuli, ten subjects were shown one of four ribbon…

A set of studies investigated the relative importance of operative schemes and figurative (rote) memory. In Study I, 60 concrete operational children from grades 1-4 were asked to reconstruct two types of stimuli from memory. In order to separate the effects of operative and figurative skill use, learning disabled children with poor figurative…

It is argued that the current theoretical orientation of motor behavior research toward information processing is only at the descriptive level. An outline of requirements for motor behaviorists to discover the mental operations that precede motor performance is presented. It is suggested that unless basic knowledge is obtained on how movement…

This paper reports two experiments investigating the effect of schooling and urbanization on short term recall and recognition memory. Subjects were 384 male children and young adults living in Morocco representing urban and rural and schooled and nonschooled backgrounds. Additional subject groups--including Koranic school students, Moroccan rug…

Two experiments evaluated the effects of mnemonic training upon 5- and 10-year-old children's learning and retention of patterns at varying intervals. Subjects were 172 middle class children evenly distributed across the two age groups. Experiment I investigated the effects of individual strategies (perceptual exploration, organization of…

Individual differences in perceptual information processing were tested using 327 ten year old children, with verbal tasks representing successive information processing and spatial tasks representing simultaneous information processing. Three sets of tasks, (1) visual/reconstruction (V/R), (2) visual/verbal (V/VL), and (3) verbal/reconstruction…

Two criteria for the automatic encoding of learning, instructional manipulation, and stimulus characteristics were studied in subjects who judged the frequency of occurrence of words, letters, and nonwords. In Experiment 1, six word lists were constructed with varying frequency of alphabet letters. A variety of instructions were presented (whether…