Children are active learners: they learn not only from the information people offer and the evidence they happen to observe, but by actively seeking information. However, children's information search strategies are typically less efficient than those of adults. In two studies, we isolate potential sources of developmental change in how children…

Suggests that Kuhn's study reported in this issue (PS 524 345) offers insight into how people make casual inferences, and raises important questions about these processes. (JW)

Suggests study by Kuhn and others (PS 524 345) is too ambitious and that the processes described are not wholly representative of developmental stages. Argues the methodology of study was progressive problem solving, and that experimenter's questions resulted in contrived stages. (JW)

Investigated the emergence of class and propositional reasoning skills as a function of the developing ability to coordinate increasingly complex negation and affirmation operations with children from grades 1, 3, 5, and 7. Found that children's reasoning follows a logical development sequence and that different groups of items account for…

Compared the effects of constructivist instruction and instruction based on texts and demonstration on third-graders' conceptualization of force. Found that constructivist instruction was more effective. Patterns of reasoning related to force were identified in levels of conceptualization. (JPB)

Explores the extent to which third graders are consistent in their definitions and explanations of nine social qualities. For several qualities, children's definitions and explanations followed developmental predictions. For other qualities, definitions and explanations were attributed to previously identified moderation variables and age of…

In this article, I explore the relation between the sociocultural and individual cognitive structuring as elementary school students, high school students, and adults play the strategic game of dominoes. I present data from a study in which players at each level were observed and video-recorded during domino tournament play. Findings reveal the…

Verbal and nonverbal classification tasks were administered in Spanish and English to 30 bilingual children, aged 6-7. Results indicate the positive influence of bilingualism on cognitive development and support a model in which bilingual children construct two representational systems--one, nonverbal and universal across languages; and a second,…

First and fifth graders participated in this assessment of ways in which differential experience with objects in a spatial array might establish relative landmarks within the array. Results suggest that different levels of experience can establish elements as relative landmarks in spatial memory. (Author/RWB)

Two experiments look at factors influencing the ways children construct an abstract representation of story structure that contains the characteristics described by story grammars. (RWB)

This study examined whether scripts provide a basis for the categories preschool children use to structure their semantic memories and whether the use of taxonomies to structure memory becomes more common only after children enter elementary school. Subjects were 108 children in three equal groups of 18 boys and 18 girls children each of 4-, 5-,…

This study tested the effectiveness of having fifth-grade students generate their own examples of selected concepts on energy. Hypotheses were that subjects would perform better on sections of a test related to definitions and recognition of exemplars of the concepts for which they found their own examples than on sections related to comparible…

This study develops and employs the construct, personal orientation to science learning, to study the processes by which children construct meaning as they learn science in school. The theoretical bases of the thesis are the commitments of a constructivist view of learning and the psychological framework of George Kelly's Personal Construct…

Two studies examined the construction of children's beliefs about projectile motion of a ball rolled off a table. Describes the concepts used by children, analyzes their use as a function of age, and gives a naturalistic description of their use. Results indicate that appropriate instruction can remediate misconceptions. (MDH)

This study investigated the role of knowledge base organization in elementary school students' memory performance. In a preliminary study, students in grades 2, 6, and 10 rated words from three semantic categories for their category representativeness. Results disclosed age-related changes in how children rate words for high and low typicality.…