The relationship among the Piagetian concepts of identity, seriation, and transitivity was explored with preschool subjects. (JMB)

This study examined the relationship between knowledge of sequence relations and the process of mental rotation in four-year-olds. Subjects were 12 preschool children who were tested individually. They were given a State Comparison Task (SCT) in which they were shown pairs of animal pictures, half identical and half mirror images of one another,…

Strategies young children used to correct errors in nesting seriated cups changed substantially with age, becoming increasingly more flexible and involving more extensive restructuring of the relationships among the cups. The same trend toward increasing flexibility of thought and action also appeared in procedures children used to combine the…

This study investigated (1) the order of acquisition of related temporal and spatial terms, (2) the application of temporal and spatial terms and (3) the relationship between the application of temporal and spatial terms and performance on cognitive measures of temporal and spatial ordering. Children 3 to 5 years of age were tested on four…

A 3-year longitudinal study assessed cognitive changes among rural children 3 to 5 years old and validated the construct validity of the Nebraska Wisconsin Cognitive Assessment Battery (NEWCAB). Multistage area sampling techniques were used with a repeated measures, control group design. Participants in the sample were 40 3-year-olds, 57…

Three experiments are reported which utilized a five-term transitive inference task to investigate the development of preschool childrens', elementary school students', and college students' ability to solve transitive inferences on length relations. A developmental model specifying changes at two stages of constructing an internal linear order is…

Seriation refers to the process of ordering objects along single or multiple magnitude dimensions such as length, weight, and color. The ability to order objects in terms of some attribute is essential for the child's understanding of the properties of numbers. This study investigated the effect on seriation performance of increasing both the…

Investigates the role of operative schemes in explaining older children's superior memory on past Piagetian memory tasks. Contrasts were made between the performance of normal v learning disabled grade school children, and between preschool children who either possessed or lacked seriation schemes. (Author/SS)

New conceptions of learning, analogy, and capacity have fundamentally changed scientists' view of cognitive development. New conceptions of learning help to explain how representations of the world are acquired. New models of analogical reasoning have suggested that logical inferences are often made by mapping a problem into a mental model, or…

This study examined the effect of an innovative teaching activity to improve concrete operational thinking skills with preschoolers in Head Start programs. A "learning set" of classification games and seriation games was used to teach the oddity principle and insertion into a series. These games were played with the children using toy ponies and…

This unit of the Flexible Learning System (FLS), the second of a 3-volume series on children's thinking, focuses on the development of order relations (seriation) in children between 3 and 8 years of age. The series is based on the application of Jean Piaget's work to early childhood education. Seriation concerns the way children reason about…