There is a growing realization that the premises of materialism are applicable within certain limits only. The mystical writings of Blake teach that man's body is a mental body, and his universe a mental universe. (JN)

The effectiveness of strategy training programs that differed in the degree of subject self management required on the verbal abstraction performance of 80 educable mentally retarded children and adolescents was compared. In terms of acquisition, all three training conditions, irrespective of the degree of self management required, were superior…

This operational theory of adult learning is based on the premise that learning is a problem-solving process involving attention, differentiation, structuring, integration, abstracting, and generalization. (Journal availability: Department of Adult Education, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS 66506.) (SK)

An article by Harvey Siegal, "Kuhn and Critical Thought," is criticized. (JD)

Used a pretest/post-test control group design involving 44 female adolescent subjects to determine whether Moral Stage 3 subjects who have attained early basic formal operations are more susceptible to attempts to stimulate moral development than Stage 3 subjects who have attained only beginning formal operations and lack the cognitive…

Twenty-two preschoolers aged 48-63 months were observed and questioned by a familiar experimenter about their spontaneous helping, sharing, or comforting behavior over a 12-week period. (JMB)

College students instructed to "fake good" on a test of moral reasoning were unable to do so, but they could lower their scores significantly when directed to. (Editor)

Discussion of image database systems focuses on semantic queries and shows how an image is abstracted into a hierarchy of entity names and features; how relations are established between entities visible in the image; and how a "fuzzy" matching technique is used to compare semantic queries to image abstractions. (Author/LRW)

A model of conditional reasoning predicted that children under 12 would respond correctly to questions of uncertain logical form if premises and context enabled them to access counterexamples from memory, and that children's performance with uncertain logical forms would decrease when empirically true premises are presented in a fantasy context.…

Proposes a variant of mental model theory which suggests that the development of conditional reasoning (if--then) can be explained by such factors as the capacity of working memory, range of knowledge available to a reasoner, and his/her ability to access this knowledge "on-line." Finds much empirical data explained by this model.…

In this reflective narrative, the author ponders the abstract nature of knowledge and knowing. The peeling of an onion while she sits in her father's garden recounting her funds of knowledge serves as an ontological and epistemological metaphor for her learning. (TD)

Organizations must balance rational/technical efficiency and emotions. Action learning has been proven to be effective for developing emotional openness in the workplace. Facilitators of action learning should draw upon the disciplines of counseling, Gestalt, psychodynamics, and Eastern philosophies. (Contains 23 references.) (SK)

A logical thinking test containing logical fallacies was administered to groups of 16-year-old and 17-year-old students (N=437) in Austria, Israel, and the Philippines. Students considered very able performed satisfactorily when required to choose a logically sound option, but exhibited weak performance when test items required a logically…

Investigated moral reasoning of male college freshmen to determine whether differences exist in moral judgments of Greek affiliates and nonaffiliates. Findings from 103 male freshman fraternity pledges and 92 independent male freshmen revealed significant differences between principled moral reasoning of Greek affiliates and independents such that…

Two studies with 28 Boston College undergraduates tested the hypothesis that people who report a poor sense of direction (SOD) have an impaired ability to use spatial information in an abstract or symbolic way. The hypothesis was not supported. Poor SOD correlates to a mental egocentrism in self-to-environmental-object relations. (TJH)