There is now wide consensus that the quality of family relationships is involved in the development of child executive functioning (EF), a set of cognitive skills that bear critical importance for social and academic adjustment at school. This body of research has, however, focused almost exclusively on dyadic parent-child interactions and failed…

Executing actions in a specific order is a critical component of many action sequences that children must acquire, the majority of which are learned through observation and imitation of others. Although a wealth of evidence indicates that children can process and represent temporal order in memory, relatively little is known about the development…

This exploratory study sought to understand the meaning of cognitive presence for graduate students in a blended learning course. Four research questions guided the investigation, which employed a qualitative instrumental case study approach as the research design. Several data sources were used including: semi structured interviews with graduate…

The emerging literature on embodied cognition highlights the role that the body plays in cognitive and affective processes. We investigated whether different body postures, specifically leaning postures thought to reflect different states of cognitive focus, can impact cognitive focus and task performance. In three experiments we confirmed that…

To investigate the development of children's knowledge of the intension and extension of four natural concepts (cup, scissors, money, and musical instrument), three questions were explored in an experiment involving one-hundred-and-twenty 3-, 5-, and 7-year-old children (40 children for each age group). Extension was measured in a verbal labeling…

The development of probability judgment is explained in terms of working memory, composed of four types of storage operations and three types of processing operations. Age changes in probability judgment were related to changes in frequency retrieval, which stem from changes in constraints on work-space capacity. (Author/RD)

A series of studies focused on (1) the evolution of the notion of identity of objects among infants up to 15 months of age and (2) the changing rules by which this development may be understood. Six identity tasks were presented to 60 infants divided into five age groups: 5, 7, 9, 12, and 15 months. Two objects were used in all tasks. In the first…

Proposes the cognitive developmental paradigm for developing and teaching career development courses in secondary schools. Proposes the major Piagetian constructs of interaction, equilibration, assimilation, and accommodation as a means of intervening in both the structure and function of the career thinking of adolescents. (Author)

THE LEARNING OF VERBALLY CONDITIONED MATERIAL WAS STUDIED TO CLARIFY SOME OF THE CONDITIONS UNDER WHICH SUCH LEARNING IS ACCOMPANIED BY THE USE OF HIGHER MENTAL PROCESSES, AND THE CONDITIONS UNDER WHICH IT IS NOT. THE STARTING POINT FOR THIS RESEARCH WAS THE PREMISE THAT LEARNING IN VERBAL CONDITIONING CAN OCCUR EITHER WITH OR WITHOUT AWARENESS ON…

To assess Feuerstein's Learning Potential Assessment Device's (LPAD) ability to identify deficient cognitive functions, Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices were administered to 176 elementary/junior high students--25 percent were rescored--and 12 complete LPAD reports from a university educational clinic were reanalyzed. Correlations were…

This study, which is a partial replication and validation of the 1962 Laurendeau and Pinard study of causal thinking, investigates cross-cultural differences among three age levels of Canadian and American school children in the development of causal thinking. Also studied is the relationship between level of development of causal thinking and…

Preschool children were given a memory task that required repeating a list of animal names and a sentence imitation task. Results confirmed a relationship between word span and language imitation in younger preschool children and the notion of a memory constraint on early spontaneous language. Increasing mastery of linguistic rules appeared to…

Examined relationships among working memory, memory span, and reading skills in children and adults. Found that working memory and short-term memory skills develop through adolescence, but working memory skills show declines in adulthood. Age-related declines in memory appear to be related to the task's processing demands, which may affect the…

Studies of bilingual children have debated the effect of bilingualism on cognitive development. This study examines the relationship between cognitive processes and balanced bilingual skills. It finds there may be a threshold level of bilingual competence to be attained before bilingualism can positively influence cognitive functioning. (CHK)

Examined high school students' scores on test of formal thinking and those on test of reading. Students' success on both tests was disappointingly low. Lack of motivation appeared to be major problem. Correlations between scores on two tests were relatively low, although there was suggestive similarity between distribution of scores for formal…