After a pilot study identified possible responses that children and adolescents give when defining concrete and abstract nouns, a study investigated the development of concrete noun (specific objects) and abstract noun (concepts) definitions given by 10, 14, and 18-year-olds, as well as whether abstract and concrete nouns are defined in a parallel…

Ninety-one hearing-impaired students entering Gallaudet University received systematic cognitive instruction focusing on specific generalizable skills, in the contexts of their regular college classes. The students were given practice in skills of organization, comparisons, analysis, classification, following instructions, temporal relationships,…

"Stimulated recall" is a generic term used to identify a variety of interviewing techniques designed to provide access to teachers' thoughts during interactive teaching. The methods usually involve audio or videotape recordings of classroom activities, whereby teachers are to "recall" what they were thinking at the actual time of the taping by…

The full power of drama as both a teaching and learning medium can be realized only when the inner world of meaning is harnessed to the outer world of expressive action. The teacher has available a number of techniques that can involve the students in the vital interaction of both frames. To involve the students in the expressive frame, the…

This study investigated developmental differences in the use of the common features abstraction strategy and the exemplar learning strategy for concept acquisition. Subjects were 30 second graders and 30 fifth graders. The concepts to be learned were two categories of artificial animals which differed on five dimensions. Each dimension had three…

PIAGET HAS BEEN CONCERNED WITH THE ASSESSMENT OF THE PRESENCE OR ABSENCE OF CONSERVATION AND RELATED PROCESSES, BUT HE HAS NOT FOCUSED EXPERIMENTALLY ON THE FACTORS WHICH CAN ACCOUNT FOR THE LEARNING OF CONSERVATION. TO INVESTIGATE SUCH FACTORS, RESEARCH WAS CONDUCTED (1) TO DETERMINE THE RELATIVE EFFECTIVENESS OF TWO PARTICULAR GROUP TRAINING…

A baseline curriculum guide developed by the Southwestern Cooperative Educational Laboratory in 1967 provides concomitant behavioral objectives for a full-year first grade program. The document contains discussions relevant to the development of behavioral objectives, including the need for such objectives, the rationale for their development, a…

This research studied the effects of instructions on children's recall in a free recall learning task. Also investigated were developmental trends, including expected superiority of older children in recall and spontaneous formation of stable organizational groupings. A third area of study concerned the possibility that younger children benefit…

In order to investigate developmental changes in multiple classification, a matrix task was administered to 80 kindergarten first, second, and third grade children. Correct solution of the incomplete matrices, comprised of three pictures in a row and three pictures in a column meeting at a blank intersection, required identification and…

In learning a second language, the student should not only learn the native speaker's patterns of phonology, morphology, and syntax; but he should also internalize the native speaker's collective view of the universe and the appropriate related behavior patterns, both linguistic and nonlinguistic. Languages divide reality into different…

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…

This "Frame of Reference Study" consists of the fifth section of the final report of the Multi-Disciplinary Graduate Program in Educational Research of the University of Pittsburgh. The term, "frames of reference," is used to mean the context of assumptions, procedures, rules, cognitive models, and conceptions of the nature of…

The authors discuss activities that help mentally handicapped adults emphasize thinking processes: observation questions, impact chart, solving a puzzling situation, and use of examples/nonexamples. The authors stress use of simple concepts, concrete objects, and realistic situations in developing intellectual skills. (CT)

Two experiments examined pigeons' generalization to intermediate forms following training of concept discriminations. In Experiment 1, the training stimuli were sets of images of dogs and cats, and the transfer stimuli were head/body chimeras, which humans tend to categorize more readily in terms of the head part rather than the body part. In…

Using a composite example of field trips from several years of traveling to Yellowstone with high school biology students, the author illustrates how to raise the cognitive level of science instruction and student learning through science field trips. The author examines what teachers can do to raise the level of both teaching and learning in all…