Concepts of existential/phenomenology philosophy more closely reflect women's experience of the world and provide a better base for a feminist science of psychology. Womens' experience includes basic cooperation, nurturance, empathy, and egalitarian morality. Logical positivist psychology discriminates against women by excluding inner experiencing…

This paper is a report of a pilot project in which a microcomputer was placed in a sixth grade classroom for eight weeks for the purpose of developing logical thinking skills. Students were first given instruction on how to program the APPLE II microcomputer to draw color graphics designs; they were then given similar problems to solve using the…

This study was designed to investigate whether problem solving inefficiency in preschool children is the result of subprocess deficiencies in the children's use of logical rules and to assess the influence of 2 mnemonic components (encoding and rehearsal) on problem solving ability. The study subjects, 108 preschool children, were presented with…

The hypothesis that high critical thinkers, who rely on plausibility estimates, would be more accurate in rejecting inappropriate inferences than low critical thinkers, who rely on direct matching, was investigated. The supposition that high critical thinkers would suffer more often from a failure to differentiate appropriate inferences from…

Described is the development of a test of inductive reasoning for fifth graders by Max Jerman. Nine test items were selected from the French Kit on the basis of pretest statistics; each item has eight parts. Appendices to the brief description include item and scale statistics and a matrix of correlations between scales and total score. (SD)

In this fourth part of a study of the relevance of existing knowledge about child development to social science curriculum development, some tentative suggestions are made for incorporating some of the fundamental ideas of Piaget into a teaching strategy. The ability of children to deal with classifications on the basis of single discrete…

While a critic measures a speech against a number of standards to determine its worth, a historian attempts to explain it in the context of social-institutional activity. After discussing the differences between rhetorical criticism and rhetorical history, this paper distinguishes among various types of historical explanations, illustrates each…

This paper questions evidence for the thesis that causal reasoning of older children is more logical than that of younger ones, and describes two experiments which attempted to determine (1) whether there are true developmental differences in causal reasoning, and (2) what explanations for developmental differences can be supported. In the first…

Eighteen research reports related to mathematics education are abstracted and analyzed. The reports abstracted were selected from seven journals, two books, and a technical report. The majority of the articles reviewed in this volume concern reasoning abilities and mathematical concepts. Logical inference is the subject of four of the studies…

Mode of presentation (word vs. picture) is said to be a factor in social class differences in performance on analogy tests. To investigate this contention, data were needed on equivalent word and picture analogy test performance. This report presents data on relation education index (REI) norms for 500 picture pairs collected in the process of…

The purpose of the present study was to determine if a developmental sequence could be established for the appearance of conservation. A series of four dimensional tasks and a conservation task were administered to 25 kindergarten girls and 25 kindergarten boys. The dimensional tasks tested understanding of comparative and superlative terms along…

Because knowledge of the component subskills of causal reasoning would aid in planning elementary science curricula, this study sought to identify component abilities through the individual administration of a battery of 29 tests to a randomly-selected sample of 84 first-graders, evenly divided by sex. These tests were: (1) verbal tests of…

Three units of instruction were given to 20 four-year-old children and 34 five-year-old children. Unit I was designed to develop the children's ability to establish a length relation between curved lines; Unit II, to develop ability to conserve length; and Unit III, to develop ability to conserve length relations. Testing of the children occurred…

Very little cognitive development research has been done among African children, and most of the completed studies have relied on "translated" versions of Western test materials that are inappropriate to the African milieu. This paucity of research has had two affects: (1) rural African children have been represented as somewhat less…

The "principle of confrontation," rather than traditional systems of logic (induction and deduction), should be employed to determine the reliability and utility of arguments. The principle of confrontation relies on the premise that the validity of any statement may be tested by subjecting it to the "risk of disconfirmation" (criticism by…