In investigations of decline of intellectual status with age, cross-sectional and longitudinal studies give divergent results--the former show almost universal declines in test performances among older groups while the latter often show gains. Although few structure-of-intellect (SI) factors have been explored in relation to adult ages, two kinds…

Examined were the relative effects of a number of variables, but particularly sex and field-dependence, on performance of secondary school students on Piagetian measures of formal thought. It was hypothesized that males will receive significantly higher mean scores than females on all measures; that field-independent subjects will receive…

This theoretical paper discusses (1) the meaning of the concept of structure, how the concept of structure is used by psychologists, and how the concept can be defined, and (2) the role of the concept "structure" in cognitive development with specific reference to Piaget's vision of intellectual development. The meanings of the term…

The purpose of this study was to isolate factors responsible for the discrepant results reported in the advanced organizer literature, and to identify processes children employ when attempting to recall connected verbal materials. The subjects were 64 middle-class children randomly selected from a local school system. An equal number of male and…

Eighty four-year-old and 80 seven-year-old subjects were given a standard paired-associate learning (PAL) task and a battery of ability tasks (Labeling, Recognition, Labeling Time, Digit Span, Visual Memory, Spatial Relations, Vocabulary, and the Follow the Instructions test) to investigate the development of individual differences in visual…

An experiment was conducted in which the relationships of basic television and film codes to particular literacy mental skills were examined. Different versions of the same film, each focusing on a different code, were produced and shown to fifth graders. It was found that children with initially better mastery of the relevant skills extract more…

The purpose of the present study was to determine if a developmental sequence could be established for the appearance of conservation. A series of four dimensional tasks and a conservation task were administered to 25 kindergarten girls and 25 kindergarten boys. The dimensional tasks tested understanding of comparative and superlative terms along…

Five conference reports that originally appeared as monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development concern cognition in young children. Included in a section on thought are articles on Piaget and his theories, computer simulation on human thinking, and an information processing theory of intellectual development. The development of…

Because knowledge of the component subskills of causal reasoning would aid in planning elementary science curricula, this study sought to identify component abilities through the individual administration of a battery of 29 tests to a randomly-selected sample of 84 first-graders, evenly divided by sex. These tests were: (1) verbal tests of…

Three units of instruction were given to 20 four-year-old children and 34 five-year-old children. Unit I was designed to develop the children's ability to establish a length relation between curved lines; Unit II, to develop ability to conserve length; and Unit III, to develop ability to conserve length relations. Testing of the children occurred…

Theories and practices concerned with cognitive functioning and development and its possible relationship to reading and reading instruction are reviewed. The nature of the strategies involved in reading and thinking are similar. Increase in task complexity for reading most likely involves cognitive functioning that ranges in complexity similar to…

Very little cognitive development research has been done among African children, and most of the completed studies have relied on "translated" versions of Western test materials that are inappropriate to the African milieu. This paucity of research has had two affects: (1) rural African children have been represented as somewhat less…

The present study was designed to explore the relationship between the theoretical models of cognitive development proposed by L. S. Vygotsky and J. Piaget. One hundred and four subjects aged four to sixteen years were selected. All subjects were in the average range of intelligence, were in the usual school grade for their age, and had no history…

Twenty-four papers prepared for a conference on Piagetian theory and its implications for the helping professions are included in this report. The conference included the following symposia: (a) Present Status of Formal Operations, (b) Implications of Piaget for the Development of Curriculum, (c) Arithmetic and the Development of Logical…

Research has indicated that across the second to fifth grade range, there was evidence to suggest a difference between the oldest and youngest groups in the memory representations which directed recall of logically related sentences. The developmental trend was from what seemed to be an unstable and fragmentary memory rperesentation, which…