A method of examining individual variation in responses to Inhelder-Piaget formal reasoning tasks is proposed as a means of identifying cognitive style components of formal reason and as a means of generating more complete descriptions of observable manifestations of formal reasoning. The method is one used by human ethologists and consists of…

In reviewing the ancient, well-worn debate on the relationship between literature and values, it may be seen that the current pedagogical theory of developing response to literature is parallel to the argument for helping students articulate their own values. Two approaches to clarifying values are the values clarification approach (Louis Raths,…

A Piagetian perspective is used to build a rationale to explain why group games are good for young children. Three major areas in which group games might foster children's development are discussed. In the socioemotional area, the rationale is that moral development, personality development, and autonomy are enhanced by the social context of peer…

Studies concerned with the synchronous emergence prediction of Piaget's structures-of-the-whole principle are discussed in conjunction with three groups of concrete-operational skills: (1) transitivity/conservation/class inclusion; (2) double classification/double seriation; and (3) ordinal, cardinal, and natural number concepts. Findings show…

This paper reviews some of the cognitive and linguistic functions which develop during the period of concrete operational thought (ages 4-9) as defined in Piaget's developmental theory. Discussion centers on the formation of classes and relations and the development of the language associated with these operations. Also discussed are conservation…

Attempts to apply Piagetian theory and research to educational settings are reviewed and evaluated. The fundamental assumptions of Piagetian theory are briefly summarized and the educational philosophy of Piaget is presented. Five representative early childhood education programs (as designed by Lavatelli, Weikart, Kamii, and DeVries, Furth and…

A two-phase study was designed to investigate the relationship between cognitive skills hypothesized (by Piaget) to underlie number competence, and performance on tasks requiring logical reasoning with number-related concepts. During the first phase, a battery of tasks was administered to 60 kindergarten and 60 third-grade students. These tasks…

This course was part of a tutorial focusing on the state of computational semantics, i.e., the state of work on natural language within the artificial intelligence (AI) paradigm. The discussion in the course centered on the philosophers Richard Montague and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The course was divided into three sections: (1)…

This book examines the Piagetian periods of concrete operations and formal operations from both educational and psychological points of view. The twin purposes are to interpret these levels and the transition between them in terms of implications for mathematics curriculum and teaching, and to derive psychological implications from experiences in…

Sixty-three children ranging in age from three to nine years made age judgments on drawings of human figures. The stimuli consisted of four different male figures drawn according to typical physical characteristics of the middle-aged adult, adolescent, child, and infant. The figures were reproduced in two sizes and were presented to the subjects…

A study was undertaken at the West Virginia School for the Deaf to test the assumption that the modes of thought of deaf children could be improved, and that improvement in concept formation would result in improvement in testable areas. Sixteen primary school children of approximately equal ability were selected and paired to form the control and…

This study defined a type of information-processing task analysis and an index relating different instructional sequences to this analysis. One hundred sixty-four college students were taught, with computer-assisted instruction, an imaginary science by various instructional sequences or by selecting their own sequence. A program-controlled…

Piaget's organismic-developmental theory of intelligence was investigated in this study to determine the effectiveness of training middle class 3 and 4 year olds on two logico-mathematical structures: classification and seriation. Twenty-four children were divided into two main age groups (mean ages: 3 years 8 months; 4 years 5 months). Within…

Two factor analyses were conducted on data obtained from measurements of the reasoning, moral judgment, and moral conduct of 75 retarded and 75 normal subjects ranging in age from 6 to 18 years. One factor analysis sought to determine relationships between the reasoning variables and standard measures of intelligence and achievement. A second…

This project was concerned with the topic of elaborative activity and learning efficiency. "Elaboration" is regarded as an hypothetical process, internal to the learner, which consists of conceiving an event that can serve as a common semantic referent for elements that are initially disparate. The objective of the project was to examine…