The New Jersey Task Force on Thinking has taken the first steps toward statewide assessment of students' thinking skills. Efforts were made to (1) define requisite thinking competencies, (2) explore measurement of thinking competencies, and (3) make recommendations accordingly. Preliminary findings are reported. (TE)

Analysis of 65 children over a 4-year period on tests of operational and causal thinking offers support for Piaget's notion of stage progression. In kindergarten and grade one, the majority of children in this longitudinal study were between preoperational and the achievement stage of operational thought. By grade two, the majority had attained…

Two studies examined modifiability in intellectual functioning in older adults. The fluid-crystallized theory provided a theory base for the research. (Fluid intelligence follows a normative decline through adulthood, while crystallized intelligence remains stable or even increases.) In the first study thirty subjects (average age 69.2)…

This paper reviews studies in which scores on Piagetian tests of logical thought were correlated with IQ, mental age (MA) and chronological age (CA), and examines the possible effects of the size of the age range and mean age of subjects on these correlations. The data included 44 groups of subjects obtained from 36 studies in which Piagetian and…

Describes a set of Science Reasoning Tasks which are valid and reliable for assessing the ability of children to use concrete and formal reasoning strategies and can be used by science teachers without professional training in Piagetian studies. Thirty pupils can be tested on each task in about 50 minutes. (Author/DS)

Developmental patterns in one mode of formal reasoning (probabilistic reasoning) were examined in this research study, specifically: (1) to determine if developmental patterns of probabilistic reasoning could be confirmed using a large, diverse sample of subjects, and if they could be similar despite variations in the complexity of the reasoning…

Bad intelligence tests seem as inevitable as death and taxes. However, new theories of intelligence are resulting in some promising developments. Thirteen approaches to the measurement of intelligence are described, divided into the following categories: classical psychometric; developmental; culture-sensitive; cognitive; biological; and systems.…

This study investigated the relative freshman-year cognitive impacts of five two-year and six four-year colleges and universities drawn from all sections of the United States. The overall sample was 2,685 freshmen students participating in a national longitudinal study and of these the final sample contained 811 students, 280 attending five…

This text is designed not only as a teaching text but also as a reference source for students and professionals on the assessment of the cognitive development of children. Chapters address: (1) process challenges of assessing children; (2) context challenges in assessing children; (3) ethical, legal, and professional applications of assessment…