This experiment investigated the effect of children's successive encounters with a large scale environment on their subsequent reconstructions of that environment. Twenty children (10 boys, 10 girls) at each of three grade levels (kindergarten, two, and five) reconstructed from memory the spatial layout of buildings in a large model town. All…

This report collects together three presentations given by the author at scientific and professional meetings during the Spring of 1977. The first discusses present views of the variety and complexity of individual differences among human beings in the context of current research on cognitive processing in learning and instruction. The second…

This paper considers the possibility and desirability of competency-based education. It examines the present status of behavioral objectives and reviews a recent assessment of most empirical studies on behavioral objectives. It then presents a comparative consideration and assessment of the following teaching models: (1) the impression model, (2)…

Piaget has hypothesized that concrete and formal operations can be described by specific logical models. The present study focused on assessing various aspects of four concrete operational groupings and two variations of two formal operational characteristics. Six hundred twenty-two 9-14 year old students participating in the Human Sciences…

This paper examines the issue of early schooling in a review of research on school readiness and child development and offers an explanation for the findings based on the theory of bioplasmic forces. A wide range of studies are cited which are interpreted as evidence that most children are not ready for academic schoolwork until they are 7 or 8…

The first major section of this report describes in detail an information-integration theory which seeks to explain how an organism selects information and integrates it with other information from the environment and from the organism's internal processes. The model treats information as a pattern of neural activity composed of a plethora of unit…

The concept of a speech community is investigated within the theoretical frameworks of sociology and linguistics, and it is concluded that the collective competence models of Ferdinand de Saussure and Noam Chomsky are inadequate. They fail in that they are limited as linguistic models which have consistently overlooked the sociological importance…

To determine to what extent children of preschool age comprehend the meaning of logical connectives, 64 5- and 6-year-olds were told to hand differently colored and shaped wooden blocks to an experimenter. The commands involved various English idioms used for conjunction (e.g. both black and round), disjunction (either black or round), and…

A task analysis of the conceptual skills prerequisite to learning to read by a phonics-based method is made in an attempt to distinguish these skills from reading's component skills. The model for task analysis presented by Gagne, in which a cumulative learning of prerequisite conceptual skills is assumed, is used. The analysis deals primarily…

A functional (as opposed to structural) theory of intellectual development is presented and used to generate specific performance models for Piagetian tasks involving the control of variables (cf. Inhelder and Piaget, 1958). On the basis of these models, it is concluded that intelligent, field independent 7- and 8-year-olds should be able to…

An analysis of the quantitative processes underlying conservation of quantity is presented. Models of three quantitative operators--subitizing, counting, and estimation--are derived from adult performance in quantification tasks, and some features of the operators are described. The emergence of conservation is described in terms of the…

A study of twins was conducted to determine the presence of an hereditary component in short term memory and in three aspects of verbal divergent thinking--flexibility, fluency, and originality. Results showed the existence of a significant genetic component in the trait of short term memory, while none was found in verbal divergent thinking. (AG)

Teachers use questioning as a key instructional tool for a number of reasons. Four reasons were highlighted. As well, six major classes of questioning were evaluated. (Author/RK)

This paper describes a high school curriculum and an alternative role for the school counselor. The counselor becomes responsible for developing curricula and programs that aim to positively affect personal development of students. Prepared for the APA Division 17 Symposium on Developmental Counseling Psychology, Chicago, 1975. (Author)

Analysis of errors children make is modeled both with and without computers. Patterns of thinking are traced for a fifth grader, with the discussion focused on getting clues for remedial instruction by analyzing the dialog. (MNS)