Early language development is characterized by predictable changes in the words children produce and the complexity of their utterances. In infants, these changes could reflect increasing linguistic expertise or cognitive maturation and development. To disentangle these factors, we compared the acquisition of English in internationally-adopted…

Research over the past 20 years has revealed that even very young infants possess expectations about physical events, and that these expectations undergo significant developments during the first year of life. In this article, I first review some of this research, focusing on infants' expectations about occlusion, containment, and covering events,…

In a study, few subjects accepted empirical evidence of nonconservation of discontinuous quantity and weight. These findings were interpreted as support for the organismic-developmental claim that lower forms of reasoning are transformed into structurally more advanced forms. (Author/ED)

Mathematically gifted boys (N=77) and girls (N=62) completed a mathematics reasoning test, a verbal reasoning test, a measure of spatial ability, and a personality test. Findings indicated that boys not only have higher mathematical reasoning ability than girls, but also that this ability is the single best predictor of their mathematical…

The reasoning abilities to be expected of the concrete operational and formal operational student, the percentage of secondary science students that are capable of each type of reasoning pattern, and effective strategies to teach science to concrete reasoners are described. Implications for curriculum development are discussed. (KR)

Cognitive science research offers hope for the development of innovative science teaching strategies that facilitate the development of optimally interconnected procedural and declarative knowledge networks. Improving students' neural networks should improve their abilities to think critically, reason logically, learn more efficiently, and solve…

Theory and research regarding four levels of concept attainment and three uses of concepts as specified by the conceptual learning and development (CLD) model are described. Assessment batteries were developed to assess each child's level of concept attainment and also the related use of the concepts equilateral triangle, cutting tool, and noun.…

We are delighted to welcome you to the International Psychological Applications Conference and Trends (InPACT) 2016, taking place in Lisbon, Portugal, from 30 of April to 2 of May, 2016. Psychology, nowadays, offers a large range of scientific fields where it can be applied. The goal of understanding individuals and groups (mental functions and…