Young children's thinking is subject to constraints which interfere with instruction, and a developmental approach may be useful in minimizing the detrimental effects of these constraints. The approach is particularly beneficial to handicapped children, those who require remedial work, and adults with inadequate working memory for the specific…

The hypothesis that variation in accessibility of categorical knowledge affects its use as an organizational device was tested in this experiment using 36 second graders and 36 fifth graders from a middle-class community within San Diego, California. The students memorized each of two lists of words that differed in category representativeness.…

The project is based on a general systems approach. Developmental stage theory is employed as a starting point, and the developmental "minitasks" which act as stair risers from one developmental level to another are carried through with the use of Bloom's cognitive taxonomy. (Author/DLS)

To investigate developmental differences in timesharing performance, 60 boys, 20 in each of three age groups (7-, 10- and 13-year-olds), performed an auditory matching task and a tracking task alone and concurrently, the latter under two sets of instructions. Decrements produced by concurrent performance were compared for the three age groups.…

Two experiments investigated developmental aspects of the two components of scientific reasoning: induction and deduction. In the first experiment, 98 subjects, ages 5 through 11, inductively identified four silhouetted pictures by removing, one at a time and in any sequence, as few covering pieces as possible. Results indicated that: (a) the…

This study examined the impact of culture, language, and familiarity with materials on the ability to solve traditional conservation problems. A total of 80 Tzeltal speaking children from two traditional Mexican Indian (Mayan) villages participated in the study: 5 boys and 5 girls drawn from each of four age group (6-7, 8-9, 10-11, 12-13). The men…

SHAPES--an acronym for the South Plains Child Care Management Services (SpCCMS) Helping, Assisting and Preparing Educators and Staff--is also the name of a preschool readiness curriculum that is being developed for use by administrators and teachers. The first phase of the curriculum development consists of the publication of five books to be used…

An analysis of children's narrative composition and art revealed concurrent development at both a general structural level and at a fine-grained detail level. A three-part study investigated whether this general cognitive pattern would be maintained across a different range of tasks: literary composition, scientific reasoning, and working memory.…

If, as research suggests, exposing children to two languages and two cultures provides a cognitive advantage, it could be assumed that a child exposed to two languages may be accelerated in a more advanced cognitive stage (as defined by Piaget) than a child exposed to only one language. This study sought to determine when Hispanic children from…

Responds to Claire Golumb's research on the cognitive development of young children's ability to create representations of reality using visual arts. Asserts that young children must find acceptable pictorial substitutes when producing representations. (CFR)

One of a series of documents produced by a nationwide network of early childhood education specialists, teachers, parents, and Head Start staff, the guide describes developmental characteristics of preschool and elementary school students by grade level. Arranged into five curriculum areas, the first presents physical, motor, social, cognitive,…

The purpose of a study was to explore the link between conceptual understanding, free exploration of hands-on science center exhibits, and Piagetian cognitive developmental levels. In this primarily qualitative study, which is based upon interview and observational data, patterns in children's behavior relating to specific hands-on science center…

Piaget's model of children's conceptual learning and development was compared with Klausmeier's Conceptual Learning and Development (CLD) model in a longitudinal study. The CLD model suggests four successive levels of concept learning: (1) concrete--recognizing an object which has been encountered previously; (2) identity--recognizing a known…

A case study of a pair of extremely deprived twin boys focuses on their verbal communication. Talkativeness alone was not regarded as a measure of intelligence, but attention was paid to the less talkative twin's greater use of imaginative speech. Speculations are made on the evolutionary role of creative speech. (IS)