Diana Laffin and Maggie Wilson want their pupils to connect with people in the past and to experience some of their emotions. The emotional factor is a difficult one in history, both for pupils and professional historians. When studying Eden's actions at Suez, for example, what we lack is a proper insight into the immediate pressures he faced and…

One aspect of Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development was tested in this research project. It was hypothesized that an adult individual in the concrete stage of development is able to use seriation and classification in dealing with concrete objects, but is unable to think in terms of possibilities. An individual operating on the formal…

Preservice elementary teachers' use of examples in recognizing and disproving invalid deductive arguments related to topics in elementary school mathematics was examined. Two forms of the Classroom Logic Test were developed, one multiple choice and one free response. Subjects were asked to judge the correctness of arguments and, if incorrect,…

Many educators believe that, regardless of innate abilities and acquired skills, students at different educational levels do not think in the same way. To account for these differences, 119 female students representing four educational levels (high school seniors to graduate students) completed the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal Form A…

This study investigates the training of inner-city first and second graders in Piagetian classification skills. Twenty boys and 20 girls were pretested for necessary baseline knowledge and were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. Both groups were given training programs intended to assist the children in developing classification…

Children aged 2-1/2 to 3-1/2 years in three preschool programs were given a test battery consisting of classification, relations, and conservation tasks. One program (Ausubelian) was formal and two programs (Piagetian and Tradition) were informal. Posttest data for the first year of a three-year longitudinal study indicated significantly superior…

In the perspective on cognitive development provided by Jean Piaget, the elaboration of cognitive skills is possible and acceptable, although it is objectionable and perhaps impossible to attempt to accelerate those skills. The explicit teaching of reasoning skills is necessary since not every student attains the formal operational level without…

The purpose of this investigation was to classify a sample of high school biology students into concrete and formal operational levels using three separate instruments: (1) a battery of Piagetian tasks (the pendulum, bending rods, and the balance beam); (2) a written biology examination consisting of questions requiring concrete and formal…

The development of the Test of Logical Thinking (TOLT), a group test of formal reasoning ability that requires students to solve problems and to justify the solutions obtained, is presented. Procedures are described for investigations of internal consistency, construct validity, and criterion-related validity. Items used in prior research serve as…

THIS BIBLIOGRAPHY LISTS MATERIAL ON VARIOUS ASPECTS OF COGNITION. APPROXIMATELY 120 UNANNOTATED REFERENCES ARE PROVIDED TO DOCUMENTS DATING MAINLY FROM 1960 TO 1966. LISTINGS ARE PRIMARILY JOURNAL ARTICLES, CONFERENCE PAPERS, AND RESEARCH REPORTS. SOME OF THE SUBJECT AREAS INCLUDED ARE (1) COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT, (2) PIAGET'S THEORIES, (3)…

THIS DOCUMENT IS A COPY OF A SPEECH WHICH LOOKS AT EDUCATIONAL CHANGE FROM THE VIEWPOINT OF THE SOCIAL SCIENTIST. THE AUTHORS POINT OUT THAT EDUCATIONAL HISTORY SUPPORTS THE THESIS THAT CHANGES IN THE AIMS AND FUNCTIONS OF PUBLIC EDUCATION ARE DIRECTLY RELATED TO THE VIEW THE LARGER SOCIAL CONTEXT HOLDS OF ITS OWN AIMS AND FUNCTIONS. THEY…

Current Scoring practices for multiple-choice tests are rooted in early Associationist Theory and are based on a two-step procedure: (1) right answers counted as ones and wrong answers are zeros, and (2) number of right answers form a total-correct score. The author contends that if either step is invalid, the use of the general linear model (GLM)…

Two hundred nine Puerto Rican students in East Coast colleges, from mixed bilingual backgrounds, were administered four matched pairs of deductive reasoning tests in Spanish and English. Measures of reading comprehension in these two languages were also collected. Results indicated that performance on logical reasoning tests in each language can…

A major obstacle to the effective educational use of computers is the lack of a natural means of communication between the student and the computer. This report describes a technique for generating such natural language front-ends for advanced instructional systems. It discusses: (1) the essential properties of a natural language front-end, (2)…

This response mode study attempts to determine whether different response modes are helpful or not in facilitating the thought process in a given problem solving situation. The Luchins Water Jar Test (WJT) used in this study illustrates the phenomena "Einstelling" (mechanization of response) because it does not require any specialized content…