An investigation of Piaget's theory of object concept development through a series of six tasks administered in a combined longitudinal/cross-sectional design (which incorporated a number of methodological controls). Subjects were 36 infants who received the six tasks during each of three testing sessions over a 6-month period. (Author/ED)

Young children's thinking is subject to constraints which interfere with instruction, and a developmental approach may be useful in minimizing the detrimental effects of these constraints. The approach is particularly beneficial to handicapped children, those who require remedial work, and adults with inadequate working memory for the specific…

Task performance experiments concerning properties of mathematical groups with 10 and 11 year-old children are discussed including transfer effects, effects of structural relations, individual differences, and memory (both short and long term). (JG)

The middle school originated out of an understanding for the need of a learning environment geared specifically to the needs of the early adolescent. The transition from concrete to formal operational thought and the affective and psychomotor developmental stages demonstrate the uniqueness of the early adolescent experience. (JN)

Used multiple baseline design with four 6-year-old Latino children to train in class inclusion through counting, feedback, and verbal reinforcers, and in English language skills (of benefit in their own right), over 5 months. Found that post-intervention gains in the two domains were significant and were stable over at least 4.5 months. (KB)

The paper notes A. Hore and W. Tryon's support of the developmental position that persons with and without mental retardation of similar mental age show similar cognitive patterns, but suggests that mental age is psychometrically invalid and Piagetian tasks are inappropriate to evaluate this position. An information processing approach is…

Studied the ability of 8- and 11-year olds, and college-age subjects, to allocate attention rapidly. Older subjects were better able to reallocate attention. The developmental change in the reallocation of attention appears to be continuous and quantitative. Improvement is linked to the ability to use active attentional strategies. (Author/GH)

Administered five Piagetian tests to 180 adolescents for comparison to similar samples from 1967 and 1972. Found that today's adolescents exhibited higher levels of cognitive development than did previous cohorts. Gain varied across tasks, being very large for combinatory thought but mixed for conservation. This acceleration of cognitive…

Three longitudinal studies examined means-ends behavior of 6- to 8-month olds. Found that intentional means-end behavior increased between 6 and 7 months, with 7-month olds' performance influenced by the presence of a toy on the cloth. Performance was the same when cloth was attached to or separate from the toy. By 8 months, infants adjusted…

Two experiments used a formal model of developmental discontinuity derived from catastrophe theory to test whether the transition from Rule I to Rule II on the balance scale task proceeds discontinuously from ages 6 to 10, focusing on five catastrophe flags. Found that bimodality, inaccessible region, hysteresis, and sudden jump were clearly…

Piaget and Inhelder, in The Child's Conception of Space (1956), described the coordination of viewpoints (CV) spatial operation as one of the prerequisites to the development of the rotation and development (RD) spatial operation. This study investigated this developmental dependency notion and also evaluated the effects of age and sex on the…

Argues that there are significant ways in which neither Piaget nor his successors in developmental psychology have adequately described the child's mind and how it changes. Proposes alternative guidelines for research that aims more directly at identifying essential constituent features of the child's mental reality. (PCB)

Reports on day-care and preschool programs in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, describing infant-toddler care, preschool programs, research projects, parent involvement, and future trends. (DB)