Describes a study of 708 eleventh and twelfth graders of cognitive development and their ability to learn physics. The theories of Piaget were used as a model to study the teaching and learning of physics. (MDR)

Investigates the prevalence of developmental cognitive differences among college students and the relation of scores on cognitive tests to an objective form of assessment of achievement, namely, the final grade in a conventional physics course. (GA)

A reply to a critique of Pascual-Leone's model of children's information processing capacity. (BD)

Reports the use of a memory load-interference paradigm and the easy-to-hard paradigm as converging operations to study capacity limitations in five- to six-year-old's reasoning. Concludes that transitive inference ability in children is capacity limited. (HOD)

Describes recent developments in brain science with implications for persons whose research interests are in science education. Discusses new conceptual models, useful methods and techniques, and how neuroscience paradigms and technologies can be applied to teaching and learning. (JM)

Described the development and evaluation of a measure of cognitive belief systems and thinking styles. Reliability and validity results were poor for junior college students. For university and nonstudent populations, cognition scores discriminated social anxiety. The Cognition Scale of Assertiveness is a reliable and valid measure of cognitive…

Examines the long-term effects of cognitive modification and informed teachers on communication apprehension among fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade students. Results indicate that the treatment had lost its effect two months after termination for the majority of students. Informed teachers had no effect on the children's communication…

The thought processes of 507 elementary, secondary, and university students engaged in problem-solving situations are examined in this study. Results indicated that pupils who got correct answers often showed incorrect reasoning justifications. No significant sex differences were indicated. (MP)

Factor analysis of correlations among the measures of recall clustering, free sorting, and recognition errors revealed significant convergent validity for consistent use of a semantic perceptual organization strategy in the three tasks. Ten-year-old, adult, and elderly adult subjects relied on a semantic strategy; four- and six-year-olds encoded…

Examines the transition from concrete to formal thought in Piagetian theory. The questions investigated relate to the abruptness of the transition period, the simultaneity of changes across schemes, and the influence of one scheme of development on another. (SA)

Evaluated the psychometric utility of a home literacy environment measure. Examined the measure's accuracy in predicting unique variance in children's performance on academic achievement measures after accounting for other important sources of variance, such as IQ and maternal education. Claims that this measure is psychometrically strong and…

Demonstrates the use of Rasch models to assess the dimensionality of an item set across cohorts in longitudinal studies. Presents data from a study on adolescents' deductive reasoning ability showing that the same test items can be measuring qualitatively different latent traits in different subsamples or at different time points. (JPB)

Investigated the emergence of class and propositional reasoning skills as a function of the developing ability to coordinate increasingly complex negation and affirmation operations with children from grades 1, 3, 5, and 7. Found that children's reasoning follows a logical development sequence and that different groups of items account for…

Three-year-old children (n=41) with mild learning problems and 41 typical children were given a battery consisting of seven simple cognitive tasks shown to contribute toward the differentiation of children with and without mild learning problems. Picture identification, oppositional concepts, identity discrimination, and semantic…