Examined developmental and individual differences in tendencies to favor analytic over heuristic responses in three tasks (inductive reasoning, deduction under belief bias conditions, probabilistic reasoning) in children varying in age and cognitive ability. Found significant increases in analytic responding with development on first two tasks.…

Describes elementary school child characteristics and outlines several developmentally appropriate activities counselors can use to help children better understand world of work. Argues that descriptive occupational counseling activites on elementary level should be supplemented by activites reinforcing career-related competencies of planfulness…

Two experiments examined the development of children's memory for spatial location or color. Results refuted the proposal that in contrast to color, spatial location would not show developmental improvement because it is remembered automatically. Suggests that, for the age range studied, there was developmental change in the efficiency of…

Investigated development of working memory in the transitional period from infancy to preschool years. The age-related increase in scores on the Imitation Sorting Task (IST) appeared to be about one unit every six months. Results suggest that the IST has a good construct validity. (AA)

Three experiments explored the developmental relationship between counting and number conservation in children from three to six years old. Results indicated that there was a close relationship between the two; that only the oldest children gave evidence of conserving; and that, in general, there is evidence of protracted development in young…

Seventy-five 4-, 6-, and 8-year olds participated in a study examining the relationship between children's awareness and use of strategies for self-control. Knowledge of strategies was more highly correlated with process than with performance, and the relationship between knowledge about strategies and actual performance increased with age. (AA)

Forty children were divided into four groups and administered the Tower of Hanoi puzzle using static and dynamic approaches. The benefits of age and ability were indicated by significant improvement from the general failure of the four- to five-year olds to the success of the majority of the high ability seven- to eight-year olds. (Author/JDD)

The degree to which reading ability and intelligence, as measured by the Raven Progressive Matrices Test, were related was studied for 486 students in grades 2 through 12 in a small town, rural school system. Results indicate the strong and consistent relationship between general intelligence and reading ability. (SLD)

Recall of "to-be-remembered items" benefited from schematically related, superordinate, and slot filler cues, but not coordinate cues. The relative strength of different relationships does not appear to change with age. Findings are consistent with the view that lexical memory is schematically and taxonomically organized from early…

Two experiments investigated the relationship between family size and "theory of mind." Results from an experiment with three- and four-year olds showed that children from larger families were better able than children from smaller families to predict a story character's mistaken (false-belief based) action. (MDM)

Examined the development of proportional reasoning by means of a temperature mixture task. Results show the importance of distinguishing between intuitive knowledge and formal computational knowledge of proportional concepts. Provides a new perspective on the relation of intuitive and computational knowledge during development. (GLR)

Four experiments examined the possibility that second and fourth graders and college students are sensitive to inference constraint when they make causal inferences and assess their understanding of a story. Inference likelihood and understanding ratings varied with constraint for all ages. Results suggest that comprehension monitoring and text…

A study of 13 14-month-old and 12 18-month-old children found that the younger infants relied more on gestures and fussing to express their physical wants, whereas the older infants relied more on vocal responses, especially when clarification of their wants was needed. (MDM)

Tested children's ability to compute perspectives from locational and structural descriptions of scenes. Children from 4 to 10 years of age were given perspective-taking problems that involved abstract multicomponent scenes; responses entailed the reconstruction of alternate views. Four-year olds were unsuccessful; 10-year olds were successful…

Children's analogical reasoning has traditionally been measured by classical four-term analogy tasks or problem-solving tasks. Current theories of analogical development and the evidence on which they are based are reviewed. It is concluded that structural views of analogical development are wrong, and knowledge-based accounts of what develops are…