In many cultural contexts, judging another as conscious or not has profound practical, legal, and philosophical consequences. However, little research focuses on how our ability to make such judgements arises. Thirty years ago a classic set of studies by Flavell et al. demonstrated that children do not develop a complex understanding of conscious…

Cognitive development of eighth-grade students, as identified by Jean Piaget, occurs during a time when many of them are transitioning between concrete operations and formal operations where the ability to think in abstract concepts becomes possible. Because of this period of transition, many eighth-grade students find difficulty in demonstrating…

To promote learning and transfer of abstract ideas, contemporary theories advocate that teachers and learners make explicit connections between concrete representations and the abstract ideas they are intended to represent. "Concreteness fading" is a theory of instruction that offers a solution for making these connections. As originally…

This study aimed to analyze the abstraction process of twelve-grade students' continuity knowledge through the RBC+C abstraction model. With this aim, a semi-constructed interview was conducted with two twelfth-grade students and recorded with a video camera. Two different research problems were addressed in the interview, and the students were…

Philosophers and scientists seeking to conceptualize consciousness, and subjective experience in particular, have focused on sensation and perception, and have emphasized binding--how a percept holds together. Building on a constructivist approach to conception centered on separistic-holistic complexes incorporating multiple levels of abstraction,…

Study indicates that for children, but not for adolescents, the number of concepts produced was inversely related to the level of abstractness of the stimuli. (Author/MG)

Five arguments are presented as to the inappropriateness of Piaget's "stage of formal operations" as the final stage of cognitive development. (MJB)

"A partial replication and extension of Bruner and Kenney's (1966) study of the concept of proportionality was run with 5- and 7-year-old children... Results demonstrated importance of avoiding verbal ambiguity in the investigation of nonverbal cognitive competence. (Author)

This study examined children's development of the concept of the reciprocal relationship of question and answer by asking subjects to form questions to fit given answers and to form answers for given questions. A total of 72 children (18 per grades 1, 4, 7, and 10) participated in the study. Each child was tested individually on two tasks (the…

This paper describes six experiments performed to investigate elementary school childrens' understanding of a proportionality concept, the concept of fullness. (CM)

This paper examines the nature of concepts and conceptual processes and the manner of their formation. It argues that a process of successive abstraction and systematization is central to the evolution of conceptual structures. Classificatory processes are discussed and three levels of abstraction outlined. (Author/SJL)

A sample of 144 children from nursery school, first, and third grades were given a series of problems in which they were required to judge which of 2 synchronous events was longer in duration and to rationalize their judgments. (Author/JMB)

In a study to determine procedural effects of volume conservation tasks performed by adolescent females, the results revealed that the LaVatelli water displacement test was significantly more difficult than the Elkind test or Piaget's test. (Author/RL)

To determine whether children possess representations and concepts of space before they acquire verbal descriptions of these, children's formation of symbolic representations of space and their acquisition of verbal referents for them were observed. It was found for subjects in the study that conceptual representations of space relations were…

According to Piaget's (1958) theory of cognitive development, the stage of Formal Operational Thinking, highly abstract, as opposed to concrete, thinking, emerges during the adolescent period. Recent research suggests that "all" adolescents, or even adults, "do not" develop complete formal reasoning. Attempts to integrate…