A total of 47 6-year-old children listened to stories after which they either constructed pictorial representations of those stories from a set of backgrounds and cut-out figures and objects, or they spent equivalent time classifying geometric figures. The pictorial elaboration task inhibited recall of the stories. This contrasts with results…

A preschool curriculum for lower class children was developed based on Piaget's theory. Evaluation procedures were developed to parallel a Piagetian curriculum. According to Piagetian theory, the mechanism of classification is the coordination of the intensive and extensive properties of a group of objects. The ability to dichotomously classify…

This instructional module for teacher education has two main goals: (a) participants will group objects or events and (b) participant will share his grouping with others, either verbally or with graphs. The graphing conventions used in the module are based on the materials developed by the Commission on Science Education of the American…

Authors of the taxonomy made various claims about its properties that concern both educational and psychological issues; these claims have stimulated investigations of the taxonomy's validity. As the taxonomy is now entering its twenty-second year, this review attempts to survey these investigations and appraise the findings. (Author/CP)

This study was designed to contrast children's recall clustering before and after they acquired stable input organizations. A sample of 120 subjects (24 from preschool grades, 1, 4, 7, and college) performed two successively presented, procedurally identical, series of recall-sort-recall tasks. (Author/JMB)

The focus is on how reasoning can be developed through the study of two-dimensional shapes, their properties, and the relationships among them. Research on children's understanding of geometric shapes is reviewed and activities to develop analyzing and classifying skills are given, with a bibliography included. (MNS)

Describes three experiments that examined how children (4- to 11-year-olds) use their knowledge of the attributes of living things to infer whether particular objects are alive. (HOD)

An investigation of social behavior measures obtained from interviews and a wide variety of cognitive variables rarely produced significant relations. Results suggest that rather than trying to place social intelligence within a cognitive abilities taxonomy, a separate taxonomy of social intelligence should be developed. (Author/BS)

The fundamental question in creating coding categories for an open-ended questionnaire is how to transform a complete transcript into manageable pieces of data. This paper describes the methodology involved in coding qualitative data derived from an evaluation of the Cognitive Approaches to School Leadership (CASL) program. The first task was to…

This brief paper presents a summary of a study which examined the developmental progression of categorization and its relationship to language development in 12 adults with severe to profound mental retardation and with less than 100 words of expressive language (including manual signs). Subjects were asked to sort physically eight miniature…

Asserting that the ability to compare is basic to any cognitive process, this paper draws on Reuven Feuerstein's theory of mediated learning experience to guide teachers in encouraging the development of young students' spontaneous comparative abilities. Teachers are to provide students with concepts, labels, operations, and relationships to…

This study used the "double easy-to-hard" paradigm to examine the hypothesis that the class inclusion (CI) task should be equivalent in relational complexity to the transitive inference (TI) problem. Participating in the study were 64 girls and 50 boys, with a mean age of 8 years, 6 months. Stimuli for easy versions of the tasks were…

Four hundred subjects 8 to 11 years old were given a modification of the Weigl Color Form Sorting Test in an attempt to assess the influence of chronological age, mental age, intelligence, and vocabulary level on the ability to utilize various numbers and different kinds of criteria of classification. (Author/MP)

Experts' perceptions of mathematical problem structures were compared with students' perceptions before and after a course on mathematical problem solving. After the course the students perceived problem relatedness more like the experts, indicating that criteria for problem perception shift as a person's knowledge bases become more richly…

Compared children's concept of illness with that of adults. Results suggested that both causes and symptoms of affected adults' categorization of illness, with neither type of feature being definitive. Children's ascriptions of illness generally matched adults' but were highly correlated with judgments of illness. Children also viewed illness as a…