First and second graders' understanding of transitivity for each of the relations "larger than,""smaller than,""longer than," and "shorter than" was investigated. Results showed that on only two of the eight comparisons did the order of presentation of the premises make a significant difference in students'…

Advance organizers may fail to promote learning even though they are approximately related to the main learning experience and internally meaningful and logical. If they are to optimize the likelihood that new materials will be readily and properly subsumed, they must also be constructed to conform to the cognitive preparedness and scholastic…

A presentation of learning experiences involving materials is recommended which reflects the sequence of the developmental stages. This sequence is concrete, concrete-abstract, pictorial-abstract, and abstract. Instructional examples at each level are presented. (JP)

A total of 450 seventh and eighth graders responded to six tasks requiring proportional reasoning and representing different degrees of concreteness. Results showed that more students answered questions correctly when concrete aspects existed, and that about one-fourth of the group was unpredictable in applying proportional reasoning at the formal…

In the experiment discussed, three modes of presenting materials to second grade students were compared. Data analysis showed that the abstract mode was less successful than the others, but there was no clear difference between the manipulative and pictorial modes. (SD)