The "Vygotsky on Education Primer" serves as an introduction to the life and work of the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky. Even though he died almost eighty years ago, his life's work remains both relevant and significant to the field of education today. This book examines Vygotsky's emphasis on the role of cultural and historical context in…

Jean Piaget's theories about the development of intelligence and their implications for educational practice are explored. Before Piaget began studying the intellectual processes of children, researchers regarded them as "little adults." He derived his early fame from his theory of the "cognitive stages" of childhood. He…

Examines Ausubel's theory of learning as a model of the role concerning the influence of prior knowledge on how learning occurs. Research evidence for Ausubel's theory is presented and discussed. Implications of Ausubel's theory for teaching are summarized. (PEB)

This series of four studies investigated the abilities of children in grades five through eight to perform on a reasoning test written in both Ikonic and Symbolic form. An abstract reasoning test which had been shown to be highly correlated with success in mathematics was rewritten into Ikonic form. Children whose ages bridge the gap between the…

Piaget's constructs of concrete-operational and formal-operational stages are illustrated by quoting comments from Piaget and Inhelder (1958), summarizing the kinds of reasoning to be expected at each substage, and relating this reasoning to specific mathematical items. (DT)

School size, age and sex of students as related to scores on the six Piagetian Developmental Thought Processes Tasks were investigated. Five hundred seventy-four students from seventh through twelfth grades were randomly selected from 25 different schools classified as small, medium, or large. Data were treated through factorial analysis of…

Fifteen kindergarten children, who began the study with Piaget's stage II seriation capabilities (they could serial order sticks but could not insert a number of sticks into an already ordered set), were individually given 30 minutes of seriation training on three consecutive days. Cue fading and the manipulation of discrimination levels were used…

Different types of understandings are presented as different facets of the development of the mental processes. (MP)

Authors explore some newly developed concepts about learning and discuss the influence of these concepts on current investigations of cognitive development in children. (HS)

The focus of this discussion is on the providing of educational experiences which will help students develop skills at various levels of learning awareness. Examples of different levels and the skills associated with them are presented. (JP)

The effects of numerical and visual cues, equality or inequality of initial volumes, size of measurement unit, and order of cue presentation on conservation of liquid volumes by first- and second-graders were investigated. Some findings extend, and others contradict, those of Piaget. (SD)

A theory that there is a correspondence between Piagetian conservation operations and groups of symmetry transformations, and that these symmetry transformations may be used in explaining human problem solving behaviors, is developed in this paper. Current research in artificial intelligence is briefly reviewed, then details of the symmetry…

For meaningful learning of mathematics, a learning set is required which demands that all things accepted as true should be demonstrable in terms of a paradigm appropriate to the child's cognitive development: preparatory, concrete-particular, concrete-general, formal-abstract. Future teachers should experience all paradigms to become aware that…

Describes briefly the basic principles of humanistic psychology in contrast with behaviorism and Fraudianism. Presents some guidelines for science educator's use of humanistic psychology in the classroom. (PS)

Briefly reviews Piaget's theory of cognitive development and explains why students who are not formal operational have difficulty with chemical concepts. (MLH)