A study directed toward the education of preschool children is presented. This study, the Appalachia Preschool Education Program, was designed to affect the performance of children aged 3, 4, and 5 in four skill areas: orienting and attending, motor activity, language, and cognition. One of the instruments used in the evaluation of the program was…

The subject of language learning of children in bilingual families is considered in this paper. The author discusses practical problems and provides examples from his own family situation in which his children learned French, English, and German. The possibility of language mixture is discussed and the author presents some tentative conclusions…

One of the several causal mechanisms for errors made by adult second language learners is interference from the native language. This paper attempts to account for the cognitive nature of interference by proposing two psycholinguistically based principles that will explain various types of production and perception errors made of second language…

Grounded in a review of existing theories and research on problem solving, the theoretical base and new instrument development efforts discussed in this publication have been sounded against the needs of an innovative, interdisciplinary curriculum project called Unified Science and Mathematics for Elementary Schools (USMES). It is the work on new…

Controversy exists regarding the nature of the creative process and strategies which hold maximum promise for accelerating creative production. This paper provides a structural overview of the major problems and issues found in the scientific study of creativity, primarily in regard to dimensionality and criterion choice. (KS)

Factor analysis accounts for most of the variance in adult ratings of concepts with adjectives. Affective reactions are present in young infants, but still to be explored is how the stable adult factor structure develops from these reactions. Three questions are investigated in this study: (1) is this factor structure present in 3- and…

This paper explores similarities and differences between Kohlberg's Piagetian or cognitive-developmental view of edcuation and Bruno Bettelheim's psychoanalytic view which stresses the motivational qualities of children's thought. Based on observations of his son, Kohlberg suggests that children's playful attitudes, like their serious ones,…

In this paper early and later development of knowledge of syntactic structures and this development in language-disordered children are reviewed. Theories that have been presented to account for syntactic development (cognitive, cognitive-semantic and social-environmental) are discussed. Early developmental data indicate that there is not a…

The effects of observing a model and of providing a response rule on the learning, transfer, and retention of a dial-reading, numerical concept were studied in 144 third-graders. Different experimenters conducted the immediate learning procedures versus the measurements of retention. No extrinsic reinforcers were promised or dispensed. The…

Although most interactive systems seem to facilitate user work, the system described--an interactive examination system--increased the time required by as much as 100 percent. Students taking an exam interactively and on paper were videotaped. Analysis showed the extra time went to system overhead, think time, and trouble understanding what to do.…

A study based on two hypotheses: (1) The cognitive and academic effects of bilingualism are mediated by the levels of competence attained in the first and second languages, and (2) the development of skills in a second language is a function of skills already developed in the first language. (AMH)

A semantic-relatedness test and a cloze-type/sentence-completion test compared meanings ascribed to spatial prepositions by adult native English and advanced English-as-a-second-language speakers. Non-native speakers differed from native speakers in the semantic boundaries ascribed to the words, with the differences deriving from weighting…

Discusses the importance of teachers of English-as-a-foreign language (EFL) in developing countries to understand the difference between teaching by rote and teaching for comprehension, primarily in the form of questions. A teacher training course that emphasized the importance of teaching for comprehension and promoting students' cognitive…

Conducted to determine whether use of computerized file-management programs can enhance the development of information processing skills, this two-treatment experiment found that seventh through twelfth grade students in the computer-using/structured activities group received significantly higher mean scores than the…

Reviews breakthrough studies in the development of higher mental processes. These studies include: (1) influences on talent development; (2) the relative effects of tutoring, mastery learning, and conventional group instruction on student achievement; (3) the importance of cognitive prerequisites; (4) textbook organization; and (5) methods of…