This paper reports two studies which examined the relationship between problem solving strategies, response latencies, and efficient performance on measures of conceptual tempo. Study I demonstrated that teaching 8-year-old children to use efficient strategies on problem-solving tasks increased both the quality of their performance and their…

It has been suggested that cognitive style interacts with performance on tasks measuring formal thought. It is hypothesized that cognitive style interacts with task context rather than with the underlying formal thought processes. Experiments are reported to clarify the type of task that elicits an interaction and to determine whether such…

Sixty-four high school students, stratified by field-dependent or independent cognitive style, were randomly assigned to homogeneous or heterogeneous groups of four to attain concepts in the sequence of complex to simple or simple to complex, with either minimal or strategy instructions. Subsequently, each student individually attained four…

Several studies were conducted to investigate the nature and development of creative social problem solving among older and younger children in Sweden and the United States. First, the behaviors of older children were investigated formally in a large-scale experimental study of California 10-year-olds. Results indicated that children receiving…