Formal climate education without consideration of the ocean is incomplete. The effectiveness of a new climate lesson for youth that includes the ocean-climate nexus was examined by delivering the lesson to nine classes situated in separate British Columbia, Canada public schools and assessing the students' understanding of basic climate concepts…

We looked at how far students aged 10-17 years differentiate between the "force" and "energy" concepts for animates and inanimates. Within a structured interview format, participants described situations in which inanimate objects and animate agents interacted. Results showed that the younger students made no distinction…

The aim of the present study was to gain an insight into French young people's conceptual development regarding the greenhouse effect. Because this effect cannot be directly manipulated, we can assume that its conceptualization is mainly shaped through the sharing of information. Eighty French students from Grade Seven through to adulthood…

Guided by a naïve theories perspective on the development of thinking about disease, this study of 188 children aged 6 to 18 examined knowledge of HIV/AIDS causality and prevention using parallel measures derived from open-ended and structured interviews. Knowledge of both risk factors and prevention rules, as well as conceptual understanding of…

The objective of this work was to highlight the conceptions of force held by students aged 10-17 years old, in situations where animate and inanimate objects interact. In the proposed experimental situations, we varied parameters such as the motion and position of an object and the agent's effort. We asked questions about both inanimate and…

The normative rule began to predominate at age 10 and was the only rule employed by 13-year-olds. In contrast, almost all 7-year-olds simplified the equalization task to an ordinal level. Four different nonalgebraic rules were identified. Neither young children's tendency to simplify nor older children's capacity to quantify could be detected in…

Examined the role played by experience with multidimensional stimuli in the child's ability to separate variables. (Author/DB)

Israeli participants (N=338) rated five time-related concepts (time, past, present, future, own life stage) on Semantic Differential Scales. Participants constituted six age-based groups, representing childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, adulthood, late adulthood, and old age. Results indicate that people of different ages differ significantly…

Studied the development of the concepts of energy conservation and entropy in 5- to 15-year-old children. Energy conservation was not well understood until about age 15. Entropy was understood by 9- to 15-year-olds when the concept was illustrated by the gradual mixing of differently colored, rolling marbles. (Author/DB)

Two tasks were used to evaluate the relationship between concept usage and the organization of knowledge in semantic memory for 7-, 11-, 15-, and 18-year-old subjects. (JMB)

Young children and adolescents regarded the crossing of stereotyped gender boundaries as more wrong and expressed a greater personal commitment to sex-role regularity than did children in middle childhood. Although young children and adolescents viewed gender differentiations as an aspect of psychological-personal identity, their conceptions of…

Tested E. E. Sweetser's (1987) model of lying, which emphasizes critical contribution of social factors to definitions of lie. Presented vignettes to 12-, 16-, and 19-year olds--half with prototypic lie-telling, half with truth-telling--and asked them to indicate degree of agreement that statement was a lie. Found that effects of age, help-harm…

By varying task requirements within a common procedural framework, four experiments established conditions under which children exhibit different understandings of life. Overall, results suggested that even four- and five-year-olds know that people and other animals are alive and that almost all "inanimate objects" are not. (Author/RH)

Two experiments examined development of economic understanding among 5-, 7- and 9-year-olds. Found that most 5-year-olds understood the goal of acquiring desired goods, and most 7- and 9-year-olds also understood the goals of seeking profits, acquiring goods inexpensively, and competing successfully with other sellers. Results suggest that older…

Employed a series of sorting tasks with 80 subjects (7-20 years old) to determine whether children and adolescents make a conceptual distinction between events defined as personal matters and issues of morality or social convention. (Author/MP)