This article reviews research conducted on social comparison processes in the classroom since Festinger proposed his theory of social comparison. It covers the theoretical framework of social comparison theory, and it is organized around the following themes: motives for social comparison, dimensions of social comparison, direction of social…

Patterns of development of ToM belief abilities in intellectually disabled (ID) children and typically developing (TD) children matched on their developmental age were investigated. The links between cognition, language, social understanding and ToM belief abilities were examined. EDEI-R [Perron-Borelli M. (1996). "Echelles Differentielles…

Despite many disagreements on the utility of neuropsychological applications in schools, executive function measures have been found to be useful across a variety of areas and ages. In addition, many disagreements are extant in discussions of the maturational course of the development of executive functioning abilities that are dependent on…

Micronesian children residing on Truk and Kosrae were examined for performance on eight conservation tasks and on one task each of centration and reversibility (generally precursors of conservation in Piaget's theory of cognitive development). A total of 75 children were tested--33 in the village of Moen, Truk, and 42 in all the villages of…

Two experiments examined whether young children's difficulty with behavioral predictions when appearance was misleading would extend to more general domains. Found that while both 3- and 5- year-olds understood that persons dressing up in costume would retain their real identities, 3-year-olds were unable to predict that the character's biological…

Five experiments examined children's understanding of logical consistency. Findings indicated that only by 6 years of age were logically inconsistent claims understood despite good memory for claims, varying question forms, ability to identity other types of statements as not sensical or to compare/contrast claims in other ways, and attempts made…

Individuals can infer what others are likely to know by clustering knowledge according to common goals, common topics, or common underlying principles. Although young children are sensitive to underlying principles, that manner of clustering might not prevail when other viable means are presented. Two studies examined how a sample of 256 children…

To examine the neurobiological consequences of early institutionalization, the authors recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) from 3 groups of Romanian children--currently institutionalized, previously institutionalized but randomly assigned to foster care, and family-reared children--in response to pictures of happy, angry, fearful, and sad…

Research examining the influence of collaborative learning experiences on students' intellectual development has been somewhat inconclusive and largely based on samples of white, traditional-aged college students. Using data from the College Student Experiences Questionnaire (Pace, 1990), the author examines this relationship for a random sample…

This paper is based on a presentation given at National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) in 2005 in Anaheim, California. It explicates the developmental stages of the child as posited by Piaget. The author then ties each of the stages to developmentally appropriate mathematics instruction. The implications in terms of not imposing…

The present research identifies an anomaly in sociocognitive development, whereby younger children (8 and 9 years) outperform their older counterparts (10 and 11 years) in a basic categorization task in which the acknowledgment of racial difference facilitates performance. Though older children exhibit superior performance on a race-neutral…

This study provided data showing that with increase in age there is an increase in spontaneous alternation behavior in preschool children. Mental age rather than chronological age is indicated as a more meaningful predictor of a child's tendency to seek out and approach varying stimulation. (GO)

To study age-related improvements in information processing, a release from proactive interference (PI) procedure was used with 144 children in conjunction with a running memory task. For class of item and acoustic similarity, evidence was found for PI release with age, but there was no evidence of a relationship between short-term memory (STM)…

Relationships between intellectual giftedness and performance within Piagetian stages of 673 gifted students (10-16 years old) were investigated. Results showed that intellectually superior children out- performed children of normal ability at all age levels. Intellectually superior Ss out-performed bright-normal Ss at lower ages, but no…

Eight-year-olds were able to make inferential judgments based on transitive size relations, while 6-year-olds were not. In addition, more older than younger subjects evidenced serial ordering, presumably a prerequisite for transitive inference. (MH)