Reported is a method of investigating thought processes of an 11-year-old girl concerning physical phenomena such as those underlying the operations of scientific apparatus--platform balance, the spring balance, the magnet, and the pendulum. It was discovered during a period of interviews that the subject's thought processes developed in such a…

The main purpose of this study was to determine the relative effectiveness of the planetarium in attaining the perceived goals of planetarium educators. The goal areas for the 986 second-grade children involved in the study were low level Cognitive or Knowledge, Comprehension, and Application; Affective or Receiving, Responding, and Valuing; and…

Examines the effect of relevant group instruction on various children's developmental stages regarding the conception of space. (Author/GA)

Suggestions are given relating to having plants and animals in the classroom to stimulate development of the understanding of the concept of being alive, a concept not really understood by children under age nine. The research reviewed promotes firsthand experiences to help form concepts of living and nonliving, of identity and causality. (EB)

The paper presented relates to a study done examining the ability of children from grades one through six to locate a point in one, two, and three dimensions and to order a temporal series of events in one, two, and three dimensions. The performance of the subjects was also used to examine a small part of Piaget's theory of cognitive development.…

Reported is a study based on the summary findings of a series of studies which indicated that many children who receive organized instruction designed around the few major concepts of science do, in fact, use scientific models to explain their observations of natural phenomena. The instruction that children in the study received was delivered by…

Reported is an evaluation of the Child-Structured Learning in Science (CSLS) Curriculum using the intellectual models of Piaget and Guilford. A cognitive test instrument was designed to measure cognition of figural classes (CFC), convergent production of figural classes (NFC), evaluation of figural classes (EFC), cognition of figural relations…

Examined was the attainment of projective spatial concepts of third-, sixth-, and ninth-grade students. Eight Piagetian-type tasks were developed to provide evidence for Piaget's model of groupings of mental structures dealing with time and space. Task performance among grade levels and gender was examined. (CS)

Presented is a criticism of Lawson's (1988) article on the development of misconceptions of biological concepts. Lawson's response to this criticism follows. (CW)

The two purposes of this study were: (1) to identify those factors that significantly affect the use of the science process skill of prediction, and (2) to construct and test a probabilistic equation, based on a competence-performance model of cognitive development that accounts for a child's performance on tasks involving the skill of prediction.…

This study compared the effects of two specific post-laboratory discussion strategies in science on the development of the four cognitive skills of observation, inference, verification and classification. The two strategies were: (1) teacher-dominated, in the form of organized lectures based on the data students had collected; and (2)…

SELECTED PAPERS FROM TWO 1964 CONFERENCES ON THE RELATIONSHIP OF COGNITIVE STUDIES AND CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT ARE INCLUDED IN THIS JOURNAL. SUBJECTS CONSIDERED ARE (1) DEVELOPMENT AND LEARNING, (2) AMERICAN COGNITIVE STUDIES, (3) THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN COGNITIVE STRUCTURE AND EXPERIENCE, (4) THE USE OF LEARNING RESEARCH IN CURRICULUM…

This study was designed to simulate some aspects of classroom verbal interaction and to investigate their cognitive effects on students, using cognitive theory as the theoretical rationale. Subject-determined verbalization of correct cues was crossed with external sources of verbalized correct cues in a multivariable design in which sex was…

Presented is an experiment investigating children's awareness of regularities in physical phenomena and their capacity for expressing these regularities. Hypothesized and confirmed is that children can use statements with the form and purpose of a physical law. Cartoons related to Archimedes' principle (and connected gravitation and fluid…

Examined how elementary school students remember what they learn and how they learn in science and social studies. Found that students used long-term working memory for sorting, interpreting, and integrating representations of classroom experiences as they acquired knowledge and skills. Recollection 12 months later replaced details with inferences…