In acknowledging the privilege that we as Montessorians are given, "the privilege of being present as children construct themselves," Mary Caroline Parker proposes that parents also should be given that same privilege. Parker created an "Art of Observation" workshop for the parents at her school. She walks us through the…

Research indicates that gender influences how children learn. Those findings do not necessarily mean that boys learn one way and girls another. Still, there are significant differences with respect to gender and how our brains develop. Researchers have found that no single area of development influences those gender differences: rather, a…

A study explored a developmental theory of perceptual skills in theater, assessing developmental perception, reflection, and evaluation of theatrical reality, conventions, and themes. Subjects, 33 second graders, 33 fourth graders, 23 sixth graders, and 23 adults, viewed a 48-minute, nonrepresentational, metatheatrical play entitled "This Is…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the elementary student's concept of environmental image of favorite places. The research was based on drawings and verbalizations from two groups of students, one rural and the other suburban. Under such conditions, some general trends and conclusions concerning environmental images were observed. (MA)

The relation between Matching Familiar Figures Test performance and Piaget's construct of perceptual activity was examined with 48 third- and fourth-grade boys. (SB)

Specifically language-impaired (SLI) children (N=35) were compared with a matched group of 36 non-SLI Ss on tests of speech perception and language ability. Follow-up results indicated that perceptual development occurred in both groups of children. (Author/CL)

Thirty-six chronically hoarse children (mean age nine) with nodules were found to be similar to those without nodules on various perceptual measures. Twenty of thirty of these children showed improvements after a year of rehabilitation in the public schools; improvement varied according to the abilities of individual clinicians. (Author/CL)

Results failed to replicate previous findings of a temporal processing deficit specific to the auditory modality in LI children. Further analyses resolved this apparent conflict between the present and earlier studies by demonstrating that age is an important variable underlying modality specificity of perceptual performance in LI children.…

Twenty-four children (8 to 9 years old) who reversed letters were randomly assigned to either the control or experimental group (15 additional minutes of laterality training per day for 4 weeks). Analysis of results demonstrated that training did not significantly affect the number of reversals. (Author/CL)

The results suggested that on a perceptual task not related to reading or mathematics, the addition of input from tactile and auditory sensory modalities does not improve learning performance and, in certain combinations, actually interferes with such performance. (Author/SBH)

Investigated the development of classificatory organization. Two experiments examined age differences in children's spontaneous extensions of a classification and a third examined children's extensions under hypothesis-testing instructions. (JMB)

Two hypotheses were tested in this study: (1) that the elaborateness of children's descriptions would increase with grade level, and (2) that there would be a decrease in peripheral descriptions and an increase in central descriptions with grade level. A total of 211 kindergarten through eighth-grade students were instructed to describe an adult…

THE ASSUMPTION THAT READING DISABILITY CAN RESULT FROM A GAP BETWEEN THE DEVELOPMENTAL MATURITY OF CHILDREN AND THE DEMANDS OF A BEGINNING READING PROGRAM CARRIES WITH IT THE PROBLEM OF ASSESSING DEVELOPMENTAL STATUS. A LONGITUDINAL STUDY CONDUCTED TO DERIVE A METHOD FOR IDENTIFYING SIGNS OF IMMATURITY RELATED TO LATER READING DIFFICULTIES USED…