Moral and conventional violations are usually judged differently: Only moral violations are treated as independent of social rules. To investigate the cognitive processing involved in the development of this distinction, undergraduates (N = 34), adolescents (N = 34), and children (N = 14) read scenarios presented on a computer that had 1 of 3…

This article discusses (1) assessment of discourse through listening and reading to evaluate comprehension problems; (2) developmental aspects of the relationship between listening and reading comprehension skills; (3) problems with selecting text passages and methods of testing comprehension; and (4) the development of a set of passages and a…

The hypothesized relationship between an individual's age, educational background, and ability to understand aspects of semantic ambiguity was investigated in this study. The 90 subjects included ten students in each of grades two, four, six, eight, and ten, as well as ten college undergraduates, ten graduate students, ten high school graduates,…

An example is used to illustrate the four levels: rote, observational, insightful, and formal. (MP)

A study of 240 students in grades 4-10 found that fourth graders performed well on a proverb comprehension task involving contextual information, refuting earlier findings that preadolescents interpret proverbs literally. Performance was found to improve steadily through grade eight and was correlated to performance on a perceptual analogical…

This paper describes the development and characteristics of structural interview procedures designed to aid researchers in investigating children's understanding of their logical arguments. The procedures comprise a system which assesses verbal expression, understanding of implication, and ability to reason logically; it also assesses…

Investigates several key statements from Piaget's cognitive psychology and their meaning for science education. Concludes that teaching must be conducted as reversibly as possible so that when the teacher presents his own assimilation schemata it will be equilibrated by the pupils' schemata. (GA)

Over the years, teacher questions have consistently aimed at literal comprehension, indicating that teachers lack understanding of the reading-thinking-questioning hierarchy. Benjamin Bloom's "Cognitive Taxonomy" can serve as a hierarchical framework for the design of questions. Within this framework, a teacher can confront decision…

Comparison of the comprehension of proverbs of 200 students (50 each in Grades 6, 8, 10, and 12) found growth in proverb comprehension was most pronounced at two transitional points in development: when students move from late childhood into early adolescence, and again when they move from late adolescence into adulthood. Implications for…

As comprehension failure results whenever readers are unable to infer missing causal connections, recent comprehension research has focused both on assessing the inferential complexity of texts and on investigating students' developing ability to infer causal relationships. Studies have demonstrated that texts rely on four types of causal…

Two cognitive tasks of physical uncertainty were used to assign 56 subjects (aged 5 to 17 years) to one of three cognitive stages. Two tests for comprehension of speaker uncertainty were then administered to all participants. Results were interpreted as showing that development of cognitive stages is structurally related to comprehension of speech…

This paper demonstrates a method for constructing long variables using items that elicit partically correct responses across ages. Long variables may be defined by students at different ages (year levels) attempting common items within a test containing other items considered to be appropriate for each age or year level. A developmental model of…

Describes the development of an instrument which is: (1) is capable of administration to students in grades 6-14; (2) requires the examinee to construct a conceptual answer from information provided; (3) requires the examinee to use the seven major logical operations (classification, seriation, logical multiplication, compensation, ratio,…

Effects of object training and photograph training on comprehension of category labels by 10 severely mentally retarded children and adolescents were explored. Results indicated that acquisition and transfer did not differ, yet generalization was significantly more accurate with objects than with photographs. Futhermore, generalization was…

This discussion centers around the dangers in making too precise a particular concept in educational psychology that distinguishes between two types of understanding, instrumental and relational. (MP)