Children ages 3 to 5 years old are observed in a series of 3 experiments assessing their use of counterfactual thinking in causal reasoning. Results suggest that young children readily interpret the cause of an outcome in terms of a contrast between the observed sequence of events, and a counterfactual alternative in which the outcome did not…

Twenty-four 12- to 19-month-old children were studied to examine the cognitive basis for the emergence of verbs. Substantial increases in verb comprehension across contexts, abstract cognition, and the ability to engage in symbolic action were observed, suggesting a relationship between underlying cognitive development and increased verb…

Four experiments investigated children's ability to notice and remember events in which the acquisition of factual information occurs. Results indicated that children tend to report they have known newly learned information for a long time, suggesting that children have some understanding of knowledge acquisition, but not at the level of adults.…

Examined the nature of perceptual classification in children and young adults. Found that most children attend selectively to one stimulus dimension when making perceptual classification judgments. Suggests that this developmental trend does not appear to be a holistic-to-analytic shift but rather a trend toward greater consistency in following a…

Proposes a new conceptual framework, embedded in a dynamic model, that accounts for children's failure to reason transitively. Examines five different models of transitive reasoning. Develops a model of how children initially represent and then use the ordered information available in the transitive inference model and how these processes change…

Two experiments investigated perceptual primacy of dimensional and similarity relations in stimulus classification of mentally retarded children. Results support a distinction between separable and integral stimulus structures, but do not support an integral-to-separable shift in perceptual development. Results suggest implications for…

Discusses geometrical reasoning in the framework of the theory of Figural Concepts to highlight the interaction between the figural and conceptual components of geometrical concepts. Examples of students' difficulties and errors in geometrical reasoning are interpreted according to the internal tension that appears in figural concepts resulting…

Twenty-nine children with learning disabilities (LD) in grades 2 and 4 through 7 were compared with children without LD for their development of proportional structures of thought. Significantly fewer children with LD had constructed second-order logical structures necessary to act on problems using multiplicative and preproportional reasoning.…

This study reports on the historical conceptualization among Finnish 12-13 year-olds who were given a projective task to yield historical thinking. The case study examines expressions the subjects used and which were studied qualitatively, using "chunks of meaning" as units of analysis, in regard to both their meaning- content and their…

An extensive bibliography on teaching thinking skills is presented. This bibliography incorporates from an earlier one (1989) the available relevant references in the field of cognitive education as well as new references that have appeared since early 1989. This field of cognitive education is expanding at such a rapid rate that no bibliography…

As an introduction to exploring the possibilities of an inservice plan to facilitate teacher cognitive development, the theories of educational philosophers and developmental psychologists are cited in arriving at a broad definition of the cognitive development of adults. From these theories it is surmised that teachers do operate at different…

This pamphlet reviews five reports that highlight an emerging consensus among researchers about the value of systematically incorporating cognitive instruction into the elementary school curriculum. First is a comprehensive framework by Robert J. Marzano and C. L. Hutchins for an integrated approach to thinking skills that has been developed and…

An examination of the reasons behind the strong evidence that practice in sentence combining leads to overall superiority in writing began with the development of a more precise syntactic instrument than had been used previously and a new set of criteria for rhetorical analysis which focused on unity, organization, succinctness, and cohesiveness.…

To investigate similarity judgements in different cultural contexts, the performance of two groups of children on seven similarity tasks and on two tests of metaphor was compared. The 45 Canadian and 45 Canadian-Greek children (ages 5, 8, and 11) had different cultural and linguistic backgrounds but common schooling experiences. The seven tasks…