This study assessed the role of parental teaching in improving children's memory skills. Subjects were 32 parent couples, each with a 3- or 4-year-old child. Teaching sessions consisted of each parent helping his or her child memorize a 20-item set of pictures of familiar objects for a free-recall task. Verbal communications of each parent were…

This paper offers a social learning explanation for age-related changes in children's cognitive functioning. Three hypotheses have been derived from the assumption of Piaget that structures play the preeminent role in cognitive development: (1) a child can not profit from or even appreciate experiences which are meaningful at a higher stage of…

Two contrasting views of the form and structure of knowledge are discussed -- an audiovisual model vs a computer tape library. The importance of two distinct psychological systems to represent language and knowledge of the world is stressed. (AM)

Formulates further propositions towards a comprehensive structural developmental theory of cognitive change with focus on: a) organization of subject's assimilatory operations and accomodatory figurations; b) intrinsic coordinations between the theoretical and empirical cognitions constructed, respectively, by these two kinds of functional…

The factors underlying memory performance in learning are shown to be affected by strategic processing and by automatic processing. Strategic processing is under the conscious control and effort of the learner while automatic processing is dependent on the strength of associations between new concepts and known concepts in a given domain.…

The goal of this paper is to describe the black cultural style and to demonstrate its relationship to the cognitive development of black children. Children raised within a black cultural environment tend to develop a relational cognitive style rather than the more analytic style required in American schools. Children's cognitive styles are based…

Determined was the effect of advanced organizers, as defined by Ausubel (1963), on the acquisition and retention of meaningful verbal material by elementary education majors at Purdue University. Two approaches were utilized. In one, the experimental group was exposed to an 800-word organizer on two occasions prior to the study of the learning…

This study of children's memory was intended to: (1) extend a set of procedures used to study levels of processing in the memory of adults, and (2) study the development of the dynamic memory system unencumbered by developmentally influenced strategies in the areas of metamemory, encoding, organization and storage, and retrieval. Ninety-six…

This paper presents a system for describing and categorizing various theories of language and thinking. Within this system, theories are described in terms of their position on three basic issues: (1) the direction of dependency between language and cognition, (2) the necessity of that dependency, and (3) the level of specificity at which the…

In two experiments (N=210) conservers, transitional conservers, and nonconservers were directed to lie or pretend to other children that their judgments and explanations of a series of conservation problems were the opposite of what they really were. Nonconservers and transitional subjects in both studies made large and significant gains in…

Two experiments investigated the role of children's spontaneous conceptual "biases" in pictorial discrimination learning. The results suggested that such biases may serve either to facilitate or to interfere with discrimination learning. Moreover, in each experiment, age by treatment interactions revealed that in comparison to the behavior of…

Analyzed is the Piagetian concept of cognitive structure (concerning an individual's thought organization) and noted is the lack of precise psychological definition. Reviewed are deficiencies in Piaget's theories relating to developmental stages of the cognitive structure. Elements of the cognitive structure are defined; five basic assumptions are…

The concern here is with kinds of cognitive structures individuals use in making major life choices upon which subsequent development depends. The system conceptualized for describing these psychological processes, pictures each choice domain (such as occupations) as a set of concentric squares. The outermost square deals with total knowledge of…

In this essay, research done on concept learning is discussed. The study analyzes concept learning as one form of learning, formulating guidelines for teaching concepts, and describes the abilities underlying the attainment of concepts. An analytical model is presented; various operations such as concrete concepts and identity concepts are…