The purpose of this research was to study primary science students' conceptual development as it related to their understanding of materials and their properties: in particular, to determine how and why some students changed their concepts while others did not. The participants were thirty-two Grade 5 (10-11 year old) students. An instructional…

The impulse to investigate the natural world is deeply rooted in our earliest childhood experiences. This notion has long guided researchers to uncover the cognitive mechanisms underlying the development of scientific reasoning in children. Until recently, however, research in cognitive development and education followed largely independent…

Three children were observed in their homes approximately once a month for one year, from their 11th through 22nd month of life. Based on observation of the children's changing nonverbal behaviors, a five-level developmental sequence documenting the evolution of the cognitive notion of agent was developed. (Author)

Some of the findings of a longitudinal study of three infants between their 11th and 22nd months to document development of linguistic expression of the agent concept indicated that first vocalizations were inconsistently associated with nonverbal agentive behaviors and later mature utterances coded agent-action-recipient events. (MC)

Discusses a teaching experiment with (n=19) senior and graduate mathematics students. Analysis suggests that students' difficulties with the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus stem from impoverished concepts of rate of change and from poorly developed and coordinated images of functional covariation and multiplicatively constructed quantities.…

The main purpose of this study was to trace the development of children's awareness that they can learn and to describe the forms of their ideas of learning. A complementary aim was to account for the extent to which such conceptions can be found at different levels of development. The investigation consisted of two observational studies and a…

The present experiment compared direct and vicarious transfer in the attainment of affirmative and relational concepts. Second and third grade children were randomly paired as model and observer. The latter observed his yoked model solve the initial two-dimensional problem before solving the intrarule transfer task himself. No differences in…

TWO SUMMER 1965 HEAD START PROGRAMS, ONE IN BRONX RIVER AND ONE IN EAST TREMONT, NEW YORK, WERE SELECTED IN ORDER TO MEASURE THE CHANGES PRODUCED IN THE 36 PARTICIPANTS AS A RESULT OF THEIR HEAD START EXPERIENCE. AREAS MEASURED WERE (1) COGNITIVE FUNCTIONING, (2) PATTERNS OF PLAY AND USE OF PLAY MATERIALS, AND (3) CHILDREN'S FANTASIES ABOUT THEIR…

The main purposes of this study were to determine: (1) how high school students represent the physical phenomena of phase changes; (2) how they modify their representation of these physical phenomena to accommodate new observation; (3) what factors lead to student difficulty in modifying representations; and (4) how the…