Many people have serious difficulties in understanding rational numbers, limiting their ability to interpret and make use of them in modern daily life. This also leads to later difficulties in learning more advanced mathematical content. In this study, novel tasks are used to measure 263 late primary school students' spontaneous focusing on…

Previous research on children's conceptual and procedural understanding of fractions, and other arithmetic skills, has led to contradictory conclusions. Some research suggests that children learn conceptual knowledge before procedural knowledge, some suggests that they learn procedural knowledge before conceptual knowledge, and other research…

Although the transparency of a writing system is hypothesized to systematically influence the cognitive skills associated with reading development, results of cross-language investigations are inconsistent and usually do not address this issue in a developmental context. We therefore investigated the cognitive dynamics of reading fluency of…

College students were asked to reason about the relative speeds of horses turning on a merry-go-round platform. Results revealed that, unlike field independent subjects, field dependent subjects failed to reason analytically. They were misled by perceptually salient aspects of the situation. They resisted accomodating to additional information.…

Examined 1,100 boys and 1,100 girls who matched the U.S. population using the Planning, Attention, Simultaneous, Successive (PASS) cognitive-processing theory, built on the neuropsychological work of A.R. Luria (1973). Results illustrate that the PASS theory offers a useful way to examine gender differences in cognitive performance. (BF)

A promising line of inquiry concerning the development and use of formal operations strategies is presented and a number of conceptual and empirical questions are raised. (Author/PN)

Tests the relations between the concepts of time and space and mechanisms of structural elaboration in young children's cognitive development. (Author/DEP)

The effect of educational television background music on selective exposure and information acquisition was studied. Background music of slow tempo, regardless of its appeal, had negligible effects on attention and information acquisition. Rhythmic, fast-tempo background music, especially when appealing, significantly reduced visual attention to…

Ten nursery school children who knew how to count but were unacquainted with arithmetic were taught a simple algorithm for solving single-digit addition problems and were then given extended practice. The reaction time on the final block of extended practice suggested that subjects had invented a more efficient procedure to replace the original…

Two experiments investigated learning outcomes and comprehension processes when students learned about the heart and circulatory system using (a) text only, (b) text with simplified diagrams designed to highlight important structural relations, or (c) text with more detailed diagrams reflecting a more accurate representation. Experiment 1 found…

Primary school children at different stages of acquisition of conservation pretended that their judgments on a series of conservation problems were the opposite of their actual beliefs. The nonconservers and transitional conservers made significant gains in conservation, while the conservers did not regress. Cognitive dissonance training is…

Differences in component processing skills of students of different ages and developmental changes over 1 year were studied for 96 students in grades 2 through 4 and 59 of them in a follow-up. Results trace the development of component processing skills and suggest a theory of the development of component skills. (SLD)

The effects of LOGO programing and computer-assisted instruction (CAI) on children's behaviors indicative of cooperative problem solving and effectance motivation were compared for 12 fourth and 28 sixth graders. Results suggest that LOGO may foster cognitive growth through opportunities for resolving cognitive conflict and may enhance effectance…