The author developed three instruments which operationally defined certain probability concepts and combinatorial abilities and subsequently used the instruments to classify the 90 subjects of the study according to their conceptual strategies or ability levels. The subjects were high school biology students from one school; all were taught by the…

Investigated was the assumption that college students are fully capable, by the time they enter college, of operating at the level of formal thought. The subjects selected for this study were students in chemistry and physics courses at a state university and an inner-city community college. Each student was tested with a Piegetian task to…

Reported is an examination of the effects of a newly devised science course upon the logical thought processes of college freshmen. Five tasks designed to determine whether the student did thinking logically when presented with problems of conservation of volume, reversible operations, reconciliation of irrelevant variables, and elimination of…

The idea of using demonstrations to support lectures is far from novel, but as other communicating media become more and more sophisticated, the simple practical demonstration is enjoying renewed popularity. This may be because audiences have been exposed to so many advanced presentation techniques that they have become skeptical to the extent…

This paper is a letter to Professor Hans G. Furth discussing his book "Piaget for Teachers" as related to the program of the Campus School at State University College in Plattsburgh, N.Y. The letter is from the three teachers who work with a classroom of 54 youngsters. There are approximately equal numbers of 4-, 5-, 6-, and 7-year olds…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of hypothesis testing instructions compared to brief instructions on the speed of shift problem solution of grade school age subjects, in order to provide information on the development of hypothesis testing behavior in children and the sampling characteristics of hypothesis testing in these…

In this essay, research done on concept learning is discussed. The study analyzes concept learning as one form of learning, formulating guidelines for teaching concepts, and describes the abilities underlying the attainment of concepts. An analytical model is presented; various operations such as concrete concepts and identity concepts are…

Two papers are included in this report. "Control and Feedback in the Environment of a Computer Tutor" investigates some control and feedback properties of a tutorial environment comprised of a student, his computer tutor, and the designer of the computer tutor. Three classes of computer tutor are described: rigid, generative, and knowledgeable.…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate modes of art instruction for children in kindergarten. These modes were derived from an experimental art instruction program. The experimental modes consisted of all possible combinations of the following instructional components: (1) a series of charts demonstrating Line, Shape, Color, and…

This paper emphasizes the need to go beyond structural models of personality and intellect to develop sequential models of psychological process, particularly for such complex phenomena of prime concern to theory and application as learning, problem solving, and creativity. It is further argued that factor analysis, in a multitude of studies of…

In this study of high school and college students' responses to structural principles and clues to order in poetry, four groups of students were tested: Groups I and II were high school sophomores and seniors enrolled in an English class for "average" learners; Group III were college sophomore English majors in a course in intrinsic literary…

The research reported here consists of three projects: Project I confirmed the hypothesis that as rules become more complex, direct rule learning becomes less efficient, compared to teaching by examples. Based on three experiments, Experiment 1 compared the inductive and deductive teaching of simple one-to-one correspondence rules; Experiment 2,…

The question of how people learn and remember information from complex written materials is explored by means of Grime's semantic grammar of propositions and the author's analysis of the content structure of prose. This paper, presented at the 1973 Interdisciplinary Meeting on Structural Learning, first discusses such elements of the semantic…

The purpose of this project was to develop new information and analyses that would contribute to development of a systematic understanding of cognitive structure, including its acquisition and utilization during problem solving. Experimental and theoretical work was done on three specific problems. (1) Studies of individual differences and effects…

Research on massed practice (MP) and distributed practice effects to preschool children in free recall tasks is reported. A total of 40 kindergarten children were randomly assigned to High Frequency and Low Frequency word groups. No significant differences were found between the two groups on the dimensions of IQ and age. Lists of 32 high…