Administration of a placement task to 66 preschool and grade school children revealed that the concept of higher/lower was understood earlier than above/below, which in turn was understood earlier than rising/falling. Within each pair of terms, the one referring to upness was comprehended earlier. (Author/JMB)

Presents a study which assessed preschool children's understanding of "front,""back," and "side" through a variety of tasks. A developmental sequence is defined. (ED)

Efforts to maintain or strengthen the place of history in the curriculum require a solid, theoretical justification of history's utility--a utility whose description has proven elusive. (MJB)

"More" and "less" were analyzed into two meaning dimensions, "occurence" and "quantity", which were hypothesized to be developmentally related to acts of addition and subtraction. (SBT)

Reports research which reveals the difficulty children have in understanding (1) the real purpose of written language and (2) the abstract, technical vocabulary of language study and reading. (SW)

This paper examined the growth of religious questioning in children which does not have the presuppositions of any established religious system such as Christianity and noted the need for research into the internalization of the culturally accepted system. (Author/RK)

Assesses comprehension of the mental verbs "remember" and "forget" among three-, four-, five-, and seven-year-old children by having the child judge whether or not toy characters in different situations remembered or forgot. (Author/RH)

This paper demonstrates a method for constructing long variables using items that elicit partically correct responses across ages. Long variables may be defined by students at different ages (year levels) attempting common items within a test containing other items considered to be appropriate for each age or year level. A developmental model of…

The relationship between conceptual complexity and stimulus saliency was explored in a 3 x 4 factorial design using 144 undergraduates. Levels of complexity were represented by varying the ratio of relevant-to-irrelevant dimensions (1:3, 2:2, and 3:1). The saliency factor varied according to the discriminability between each attribute within…

The concepts of front, back, and side may be easily understood in relation to an intrinsically fronted item, but with a nonfronted object they depend on situational or psychological cues. A study investigated a child's awareness of the front, back, and side of his own body and of fronted and nonfronted objects. Researchers hypothesized that a…

Four kinds of understanding of mathematics are suggested: instrumental, relational, intuitive, and formal. Each type of understanding is described and illustrated. (MN)

Preschool children were required to act out a series of two-event sequences conjoined by either "before" or "after." Performance was markedly superior for meaningfully ordered sequences than for arbitrarily ordered sequences. It is suggested that the meanings of "before" and "after" must be acquired in situations which provide contextual support.…

This research on the development of moral thinking discusses the degree of moral readiness required for the comprehension of Biblical material by children. A review of the work of Dr. R. Goldman on the growth of children's religious concepts is provided. (Author/DB)

The rule assessment approach was used to examine five-, eight-, eleven-, and twenty-year-olds' concepts of time, speed, and distance. (CM)