The study examined the knowledge of the functional relations between potential difference, magnitude of current, and resistance among seventh graders, ninth graders, 11th graders (in technical schools), and college students. It also tested the efficiency of a learning device named "functional learning" derived from cognitive psychology on the…

Many students struggle with statistical concepts such as interaction. In an experimental group, participants took a paper-and-pencil test and then were given training to establish equivalent classes containing four different statistical interactions. All participants formed the equivalence classes and showed maintenance when probes contained novel…

The author investigated the importance of processing considerations within implicit memory in a developmental design. Second-graders (n = 87) and college students (n = 81) completed perceptual (word stem completion) and conceptual (category generation) implicit memory tests after studying target items either nonsemantically (read) or semantically…

By varying task requirements within a common procedural framework, four experiments established conditions under which children exhibit different understandings of life. Overall, results suggested that even four- and five-year-olds know that people and other animals are alive and that almost all "inanimate objects" are not. (Author/RH)

Six year olds and college students were given two or four conceptual problems to solve, the number of rules within the series of problems being either one or two. Number of rules and the interaction of number of rules and age of subject were found to be significant variables. (CS)

Employed a series of sorting tasks with 80 subjects (7-20 years old) to determine whether children and adolescents make a conceptual distinction between events defined as personal matters and issues of morality or social convention. (Author/MP)

Contrasted four theories of natural language category acquisition by investigating the relation between category intensions and extensions in kindergarten children, second and fifth graders, and college students. Since none of the theories discussed could explain the pattern of results, an exemplar-based model was proposed. (RH)

Two studies of 7-year-olds and college students tested the hypothesis of a developmental difference in the degree to which subjects' memory performance was controlled by categorical properties vs. specific instance properties of test items. (GO)

Emerging from a human constructivist view of learning and a punctuated model of conceptual change, these studies explored differences in the structural complexity and content validity of knowledge about prehistoric life depicted in concept maps by learners ranging in age from approximately 10 to 20 years. Study 1 (cross-age) explored the…

Compared children's performance on 2 tasks (a liquid and a non-liquid horizonatality assessment task) designed to measure knowledge of the horizontal axis by means of 2 different physical principles. Subjects were 20 children from each of grades 1, 3, and 5 who worked with 20 college students. (MP)

Two experiments were conducted to assess the nature and extent of children's knowledge about the density of objects. In the first experiment, 18 children 3- to 5-years-old were shown 8 objects which were placed in water 1 at a time. The children were later asked to judge whether the objects would sink or float when placed in water. Findings…

In two experiments, 5-, 7-, and 11-year-old children and college students were presented on each trial with a sentence followed by a probe word. The children's task was to indicate whether the probe was in the sentence or not. (MS)