Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) education is essential to the economic growth, health, and progress of the modern world. One cognitive ability that underpins thinking and learning in STEM, as well as other disciplines, is relational ability. This ability to spot common relations shared by different objects, events, ideas, or…

A study of elementary school children's reasoning processes about every-day objects resulted in implications for the design of curriculum materials used in geography. (Author/KM)

Comprehension of metaphor was examined in 36 children ranging in age from 55 months to 186 months. The subjects were audiotaped while answering questions about a target sentence that was contextually anomalous. Five pictures were drawn to accompany each story, two relating to the literal meaning of the target sentence, two to the metaphoric…

Shows a wide variety of task performance ability. Supports the hypothesis that the tasks require the use of the same or a unified set of cognitive processes. (RL)

The impact of language (especially written language) on the acquisition of knowledge and skills in children is discussed. (MJB)

Four experiments investigated children's ability to notice and remember events in which the acquisition of factual information occurs. Results indicated that children tend to report they have known newly learned information for a long time, suggesting that children have some understanding of knowledge acquisition, but not at the level of adults.…

Examined the nature of perceptual classification in children and young adults. Found that most children attend selectively to one stimulus dimension when making perceptual classification judgments. Suggests that this developmental trend does not appear to be a holistic-to-analytic shift but rather a trend toward greater consistency in following a…

Past research on the development of referential communication abilities in children does not provide a basis for explaining precisely why communicative effectiveness increases. The common assumption is that developments in role-taking facilitate the child's ability to adapt to hearers. A reasonable alternative explanation is that a child's…

Presents the results of three studies examining children's conception of the mind itself as an independent, active entity. Findings revealed a developing ability in children to interpret and produce statements personifying the mind and provided considerable evidence of children's movement toward a conception of the mind as an active agent…

Longitudinal data on conversations recorded from 1 child between 18 and 27 months of age and 3 children between 27 and 62 months were analyzed to chart acquisition of the word "if" and of conditional inference. Within six months of speaking their first "if," children produced "ifs" at the same rate and forms as…

The application of Piaget's theory of cognitive development to the assessment of mental ability of the mentally retarded is presented. Following a discussion of developmental theories and diagnosis of mental development, testing interviews demonstrate the limits of cognitive thought at each of three stages. Abnormal intellectual oscillations are…

Examined 8- and 10-year olds' understanding of the unique features of and potential relations among mental activities. Found a developing tendency to organize mental activities on the degree to which memory was a component of the activity. Results suggest that a constructivist theory of mind develops in later childhood. (AA)

Twenty high mental age (MA) subjects and 33 low MA subjects who had been in a free word association test 30 months previously were retested with the Moran 80-Word List. At the time of the previous testing, subjects in the high group had a mean chronological age (CA) of 17.1 and mean MA of 11.5; subjects in the low group had a mean CA of 15.3 and…

Levels of learning can probably be measured by questions containing various conceptual dimensions which relate to the amount of thinking or creativity required to complete the questions. A method for measuring concept levels in child development course material was evaluated. Student proctors (N=41) and instructors (N=6) rated 73 short-answer…