When proportional information is pit against whole number numerical information, children often attend to the whole number information at the expense of proportional information (e.g., indicating 4/9 is greater than 3/5 because 4 > 3). In the current study, we presented younger (3- to 4-year-olds) and older (5- to 6-year-olds) children a task…

Young children can engage in diagnostic reasoning. However, almost all research demonstrating such capacities has investigated children's inferences when the individual efficacy of each candidate cause is known. Here we show that there is development between ages five and seven in children's ability to reason about the number of candidate causes…

Research Findings: This study investigated folkbiological concepts that structure children's moral reasoning regarding conservation. Participants (N = 52; 7- and 10-year-olds, gender balanced) were interviewed regarding their values, moral obligations, and rights concerns for endangered and extinct animals. Across the 2 ages, children drew on the…

There are many reasons to be curious about the way people learn, and the past several decades have seen an explosion of research that has important implications for individual learning, schooling, workforce training, and policy. In 2000, "How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition" was published and its…

Learning must be constrained for it to lead to productive generalizations. Although biology is undoubtedly an important source of constraints, prior experience may be another, leading learners to represent input in ways that are more conducive to some generalizations than others, and/or to up- and down-weight features when entertaining…

Discusses how youngsters learn to think in a recognizable adult fashion about political, social, and humanistic issues. Reports on research on the development of political attitudes over the course of adolescence. Concludes that the major difference between younger and older adolescents is the ability of the latter to think abstractly when…

This study assessed the influence of age and ability on linear syllogistic reasoning in early adolescence by presenting bright and average 11- and 13-year-olds with 64, 3-term series problems. Results showed a dramatic effect on performance due to ability. Age effect was only marginally significant. (JMB)

A study investigating developmental differences in the ability to reason with conditional propositions used five variations of Wason's selection task to assess conditional reasoning in 132 eighth, tenth, and twelfth grade adolescents. In addition to examining developmental differences, the study had as an objective to examine the role of semantic…

A sample of 144 children from nursery school, first, and third grades were given a series of problems in which they were required to judge which of 2 synchronous events was longer in duration and to rationalize their judgments. (Author/JMB)

A study of 240 students in grades 4-10 found that fourth graders performed well on a proverb comprehension task involving contextual information, refuting earlier findings that preadolescents interpret proverbs literally. Performance was found to improve steadily through grade eight and was correlated to performance on a perceptual analogical…

Three paper-and-pencil formal operations tests were administered to groups of eighth graders and adults. These measures provided scores that indicated each subject's level of reasoning for three second-order operations: combinations, proportionality, and propositional logic. (JMB)

Three experiments tested 3- and 4-year-olds' use of abstract principles to classify and label objects by shape or function. Findings indicated that 4-year-olds readily adopted either rule when instructed to match objects by shape or function, but 3-year-olds followed only the shape rule. Without a rule, 4-year-olds tended to match by shape unless…

To determine whether children possess representations and concepts of space before they acquire verbal descriptions of these, children's formation of symbolic representations of space and their acquisition of verbal referents for them were observed. It was found for subjects in the study that conceptual representations of space relations were…

It was hypothesized that the acquisition of conservation behavior would be facilitated when stimuli were more concrete than abstract. Eighty white second graders were randomly assigned to four groups and presented with three conservation-of-weight problems. Clay balls and the conservation transformations were either shown, demonstrated, and…