Since the creation of "Sesame Street", children's educational television programs have grown in both number and popularity. However, controversy has shadowed the children's television arena for many years. Some have claimed that viewing television is a passive event, requiring little or no effort on the part of the viewer. However, research on…

During a career spanning five decades, Edward Zigler has combined scholarly research with public service to promote national and state policies that are good for all children. Often called "the father of Head Start," he served on the planning committee for the program in 1965 and became the first director of the Office of Child…

The development of 36 Down's syndrome infants and children (ages 3-35 months) who had been involved in an early intervention project for periods ranging between four months and two years was assessed. (Author/DLS)

We explore the immediate and longer term consequences of different types of instruction about a central topic in middle school science: the "Control of Variables Strategy" (CVS). CVS represents the procedural and conceptual basis for designing simple, unconfounded experiments, such that unambiguous causal inferences can be made. CVS…

Children's drawings are thought to be a mirror of a child's representational development. Research suggests that with age children develop more complex and symbolic representational strategies and reference points become more differentiated by gender. We collected two drawings from 109 5-13-year-old children (three age groups). Each child drew…

We explored how relational complexity and featural distraction, as varied in scene analogy problems, affect children's analogical reasoning performance. Results with 3- and 4-year-olds, 6- and 7-year-olds, 9- to 11-year-olds, and 13- and 14-year-olds indicate that when children can identify the critical structural relations in a scene analogy…

Although thermal conditions influence the development of living organisms in a wide variety of ways, this topic has been recently ignored in humans. This paper reintroduces thermal conditions as a topic of importance for developmentalists by presenting an example of how thermal conditions are hypothesized to influence a particular developmental…

This document examines the use of measurement tools to evaluate children's psychological development. The first part of the document discusses the identification and quantification of developmental landmarks and the reasons for evaluation. The second part reviews several evaluation instruments. The Ruth Griffiths mental development scales are used…

Piaget's concept of "internalization" is analyzed and related to Bruner's representational theories of cognitive development. Cognitive structures are shown to be real exclusively in an actual representation. (Author/SDH)

A study was conducted to test an hypothesis relating semantic structures to cognitive development, specifically that the mean number of associative complexes used by a group of children will be significantly greater than the mean number of associative complexes used by a group of adolescents. The word game "Password" provided a simulation of a…

The review surveys theories and models of human development and extrapolates from these to form a composite sketch of the "typical" deaf adolescent. Theories of J. Piaget are examined and the major stages of cognitive development he proposed are summarized. Implications of concepts of disequilibrium and restructuring of cognitive schemas…

The purpose of the study was to investigate the relationship between the physical, social, and psychological variables of the family environment and children's developmental performance on measures of cognition, academic achievement, and affective characteristics. A sample of 69 families was administered a multicomponent family assessment…

The purpose of this paper is to present some evidence linking malnutrition to physical development, brain development, infection, environment, learning and behavior. (CS)

Assesses Vertical Home Start, a program which provided children with readiness enrichment over a period of three years while the children were from two to five years of age. Results indicate that there is little durability to short-term verbal gains. However, longitudinal assessment is advised since some scores do vacillate. (HMV)

First and second graders (n=81) were randomly partitioned into experimental and control groups. The experimentals were given experiences in sorting and seriating objects. Significant treatment and grade effects (p.01) were found on a seriation test, but no significant relationships between classification and transitivity nor seriation and…