Young children and adolescents regarded the crossing of stereotyped gender boundaries as more wrong and expressed a greater personal commitment to sex-role regularity than did children in middle childhood. Although young children and adolescents viewed gender differentiations as an aspect of psychological-personal identity, their conceptions of…

Three studies examined the emergence of attention to gender categories in toddlers. Results suggested that 18-month-olds showed little attention to gender on a sequential touching task. The possibility that they could not discriminate the dolls used in the task by gender was ruled out. There was a sharp increase in attention to gender between 18…

The role of stimulus preference and various subject and task variables in the solution of matrix-completion problems were examined using children at 4 and 6 years of age. Age, the number of stimulus categories, the type of drawing, and the specific matrix stimulus categories taken individually and in combination were found to have significant…

The purpose of this study was to examine verbal conceptual knowledge of selected economic topics to test for the existence of age, gender, and/or ethnic related trends and patterns. Three hundred fifty-five children, aged 2-l/2 through 16, were interviewed in one-on-one sessions by their teachers. Five questions were asked: (1) Why do people…

Because of the general recognition of the importance of mathematics ability, and the close relationship between mathematics ability and spatial ability, eight studies were undertaken to discover and describe aspects of spatial competence in children. The range of abilities tapped stretched from very early precursor skills with Euclidean space to…

Learning of the concept of horizontality by fourth graders was investigated. Comparisons by age and sex were made. (BB)

Compared children's performance on 2 tasks (a liquid and a non-liquid horizonatality assessment task) designed to measure knowledge of the horizontal axis by means of 2 different physical principles. Subjects were 20 children from each of grades 1, 3, and 5 who worked with 20 college students. (MP)

Attempts to determine the age at which the concept of middleness," or intermediately positioned object, emerges and is functional. (MB)

Examined 6-, 9-, and 14-year-olds' imagination of the unknown within a storytelling context. Performed phenomenological analysis of the two youngest groups' drawings and the oldest group's story on the "heffalump" theme. Derived eight categories providing an image-analysis of the concept of the "unknown" structured as "something-otherwise," that…

Spatial cognition entails the ability to mentally represent spatial relations and to anticipate the course and outcome of transformations applied to those relations. The developmental histories of four tasks used to assess the maturity of spatial cognition in children are described. Significant effects were found for age, gender, task, and for…

Studied the construction of the personal stereotypes of adult and adulthood roles and the influence of gender, maternal employment, and employment goals of 237 adolescents. Exploratory factor analysis indicated a four-factor structure in attitudes toward family and career roles, ideology of fairness, social status, and rational characteristics,…

The symbolic representational block constructions of twenty 4-year-olds and twenty 7-year-olds were analyzed from Werner and Kaplan's (1963) theoretical perspective. Each child was read a story and then asked to use the blocks to represent the story. Older children included in their representations a larger number of features that were central to…

Kindergarten and first grade children participated in a training program designed to facilitate moral development. Stories that stimulated discussion of solutions to moral issues were read to children in the treatment group. Children in the treatment group, compared to controls, improved significantly in three of four specific areas tested.…

Examines how understanding of the concept of an electrical circuit depends upon age, sex, non-verbal ability, reading ability, and spatial ability among 192 eight to 11 year old students in two English elementary schools. Findings indicated performance differences by all factors except sex. (Author/DB)

In a schematic concept formation task, second and fifth graders were required to sort 60 computer-generated, 8-sided polygons into two classes. The results indicated that age differences in schematic concept formation are due more to the efficiency of information use than to differences in strategy or the selection of information to be used. (ST)