Vygotsky's seminal text on play was originally given as a lecture at the Herzen Pedagogical Institute in Leningrad in 1933, and is consequently a relatively late work. It is thanks to a stenographic record of the lecture that this text, a key influence on psychological research on play, has survived. This was Vygotsky's major work on play and…

Drawing on survey data from over 2000 parents, this paper explores the possibility of early-years swimming to add mathematical capital to young children. Using developmental milestones as the basis, it was found that parents reported significantly earlier achievement on many of these milestones. Such data suggest that the early years swim…

To replicate and extend Grey's (1981, 1985) studies involving junior-high school students, "How Is Your Logic?" (a 26-item, Piagetian-based, group-administered written test of cognitive development) was given to 553 subjects, 10 through 48 years of age. Each item of the test measured either a specific concrete operation or a specific…

Children's acquisition of developmental milestones is examined within the framework of a developmental-interactive system. Piaget's stages of cognitive development are reviewed and developmental aspects of language acquisition including inner language and expressive language are discussed. (JMB)

Children's understanding of dreams as mental states was examined as an instance of their development of a "theory of mind." Thirty-five children between three and seven years of age were interviewed to determine how well they understood the reality, location, privacy, origin, and controllability of their own dreams, versus that of a…

A discussion of models of intellectual development and their application to education identifies the two major groups of such models and examines recent attempts to combine them. The two types of theories are described as the psychometric models, which see intellectual growth as the incremental amassing and associating of discrete ideas, and the…

The purpose of this paper is to describe the development of children's measurement concepts and to outline implications of recent research on transitivity and counting. Discussion is confined to measurement of length and focuses on aspects of measurement outlined in the last two of Piaget's three measurement stages. It is argued that measurement…

This study examined children's conceptions of authority in sexually abusive situations. It aimed to determine: (1) whether children's perceptions of adult authority in sexually abusive situations differed from their perceptions of adult authority in benign situations; (2) whether children's conceptions of authority changed as a result of…

Two studies tested the observation that infants learn to use a "whole object assumption" between the ages of 8 and 15 months, meaning that they expect a word to apply to the whole object to which it refers. The first study investigated the possibility that infants of 8 to 10 months may attend differently, and more selectively, to events…

With or without the support of research, clinicians must make judgments concerning relations between different areas of psychological functioning. Recently, studies have been made of possible relations between different areas of mental activity, including logical and emotional conception and social, emotional, and perceptual functioning. Nannis…

This paper asserts that the most common mistake that adults make when relating to children who are grieving is to assume that children think like adults. It presents an outline of children's perceptions of death for children between the ages of 1 and 3, and for 4-year-olds, 5-year-olds, 6-year-olds, 7-year-olds, 8-year-olds, and 10-year-olds. The…

Concepts important to cognitive development in children can be classified according to several levels. At level 1, concepts are equivalent in structural complexity to binary relations and univariate functions. At level 2, concepts are equivalent to compositions of binary relations, binary operations, and bivariate functions. At level 3, concepts…

This paper discusses research on how concepts differ in their internal organization and how these differences interact with and affect cognitive processing in children. Two types of natural concepts are focused on: classes (nouns with class-inclusion organization, such as "trees,""students,""soldiers" and collections…

The implications of three concepts from cognitive science for understanding of cognitive development are reviewed. These are (1) learning (and induction), (2) analogy, and (3) capacity. A model of analogical reasoning is discussed that specifies changes in representations over age that explain phenomena previously thought to be stage-related. (SLD)

A description is given of an inservice course designed to acquaint teachers with current constructivist thinking and research in cognitive and developmental psychology. The focus was on sensitizing the teachers to the challenges of creating a "thinking environment" in their classrooms. The course was designed to engage students as…