The authors explore how children's play can support the development of the foundations of mathematics learning and how adults can support children's representation of--and thus the "mathematization" of--their play. The authors review research about the amount and nature of mathematics found in the free play of children. They briefly…

Rule use in perceptual classification was investigated in adults and in 4- to 12-year-old children. Two studies of performance on triad classification tasks with large samples (N=226 and N=328) are presented to (a) contrast theoretical predictions from the holistic-to-analytic-shift theory (Smith & Kemler, 1977) and the differential-sensitivity…

Investigates the knowledge of thematic and taxonomic relations of 15 children of 26 months and 24 children of 34 months. Both age groups were able to identify thematic matches. However, 34-month-olds were able to recognize a wider range of thematic associations than 26-month-olds. (RJC)

The conceptual categories that children have developed in their second year were studied in five experiments using object manipulation tasks. Subjects included 152 children from 18 to 31 months of age. These very young children had formed global conceptions of many domains of objects. (SLD)

The role of context in categorization was examined in four experiments with three month olds. Findings demonstrated that categorization of a novel object is influenced by the context present when the object is initially encountered and by previous encounters with that object in the category context, indicating that infants are capable of…

Three preschool children were observed intensively for three years to examine the ways they attempted to organize and classify the world of television. Of interest were children's changing abilities to differentiate six adult-perceived categories of television fare: cartoons, advertisements, news, adult shows, children's shows, and "Sesame…

Findings of this Israeli study suggest that perception is affected by lables, learning, and selective attention; that these effects are determined developmentally; and that as age increases, the effects of verbal cues diminish, while the effects of perceptual cues increase. (Author/DLS)

This document is Part I of a two-part project whose goal was to identify the sequential development of child behavior from birth through age seven and to identify the materials which could be used to strengthen or initiate a behavioral facet. Research on child development was collected, organized, and analyzed for correlative events pertinent to…