"Patterning" is a cognitive intervention that is unknown to psychologists, but has nevertheless been taught for half a century in nearly all kindergartens and many preschools in English-speaking countries. Patterning is the understanding that a certain rule governs the sequence of items in a series. At the simplest level, if the series…

Executing actions in a specific order is a critical component of many action sequences that children must acquire, the majority of which are learned through observation and imitation of others. Although a wealth of evidence indicates that children can process and represent temporal order in memory, relatively little is known about the development…

Two studies (1) compared the ability of pre- and post-operational children to seriate sets of 4 temporal sequences presented simultaneously and (2) examined the ability to recall sequences when given the initial, middle, or terminal item as a retrieval cue. (SB)

Study concerned with the mechanisms in terms of which the developmental transformation from one cognitive structure to another occurs. (Author)

Kindergarten and first-grade children participated in a study of the role of reciprocal and inversion reversibility in language acquisition and cognitive development. Subjects completed cognitive tasks assessing conservation, seriation, and class inclusion, and language tasks assessing the active-passive transformation and the negative…

A set of studies investigated the relative importance of operative schemes and figurative (rote) memory. In Study I, 60 concrete operational children from grades 1-4 were asked to reconstruct two types of stimuli from memory. In order to separate the effects of operative and figurative skill use, learning disabled children with poor figurative…

A study of the speech process was conducted. The process is described as one closely linked to the one involved in the problem of the serial order in behavior. It is pointed out that in the speech of young children the grammatical relations that are properties of elementary underlying sentences appear in the grammatical meanings. Six examples of…

Investigates the role of operative schemes in explaining older children's superior memory on past Piagetian memory tasks. Contrasts were made between the performance of normal v learning disabled grade school children, and between preschool children who either possessed or lacked seriation schemes. (Author/SS)

Two experiments which investigated the young child's ability to deal with multiplicative classes and relations (considered behavioral indices of concrete operations thought) in double series and cross class matrices are described and discussed. In the initial study, 160 children from preschool through grade 2 received six matrix subtasks…

New conceptions of learning, analogy, and capacity have fundamentally changed scientists' view of cognitive development. New conceptions of learning help to explain how representations of the world are acquired. New models of analogical reasoning have suggested that logical inferences are often made by mapping a problem into a mental model, or…

Performance data for 42 subjects pertaining to seven course objectives and ten propositional logic tasks were analyzed for hierarchical relationships using ordering theoretic technique. The resulting hierarchy indicated that simple implication and particular contraposition propositional logic tasks were prerequisite to some course objectives. This…

Through seriation, verbal seriation, and conservation tasks, investigated blind, partially sighted, and sighted children's understanding of quantity. Subjects were 81 children equally dispersed through these 3 groups. Age range was 4 to 17 years. Found similarity in concept acquisition among three groups that extended beyond quantity conservation…

Expresses the opinion that education has overemphasized the written word and needs to move back to the oral tradition. Warns that Americans are trained to use the left brain whereas much of engineering needs right brain processing. Gives perspectives to improve engineering education. (MVL)

This unit of the Flexible Learning System (FLS), the second of a 3-volume series on children's thinking, focuses on the development of order relations (seriation) in children between 3 and 8 years of age. The series is based on the application of Jean Piaget's work to early childhood education. Seriation concerns the way children reason about…