Students and instructors may be frustrated with students' lack of understanding of sociological concepts. We suggest that the difficulty of teaching and learning sociology is that sociological concepts and relationships require the use of abstract reasoning patterns. Many students are unaccustomed to using these abstract reasoning patterns. We use…

Three new tests presented as alternatives to the Wechsler tests for children were described in earlier papers of this session. This discussion reviews the earlier papers and comments on the developed tests: (1) the Woodcock-Johnson test; (2) the new Stanford-Binet; and (3) the K-ABC. The Woodcock-Johnson battery, state-of-the-art applications of…

Two factors which act to depress cognitive test performance are referred to as anxiety and boredom. The responses to a 20-item adjectival checklist administered to high school seniors after completing a cognitive test battery were subjected to iterative principal axes factor analysis. The relationships between anxiety or boredom and test…

This report introduces the concept of a "metacourse"--i.e., the provision of mental models, problem solving strategies, key concepts, and other structures--to assist students in learning programming, and examines the effect of the use of such a metacourse on high school programming students. The experimental group consisted of 6 teachers…

The Information Age has been shaping the conception of thinking in education through the capability of computerized problem solving, through the resulting application of the information processing model to human thinking, and through the theories emerging from other cognitive science research in metacognition, construction of knowledge, and…

While researchers have made progress in understanding metaphor comprehension, less is known about the production of metaphoric language. College students (N=129) were asked to use metaphoric comparisons to describe 16 topics. They were told to imagine themselves on a trip, writing home to someone they knew well, either a peer or a child (students…

Case's cognitive developmental theory was used in an investigation of unconstrained drawings by children 4, 6, 8, and 10 years of age. The objectives were: (1) to look for qualitative changes in drawing at these ages, (2) to relate whatever changes were found to qualitative changes in other tasks during the same period, and (3) to test whether a…

Investigates extent to which perceptual factors of speed and flexibility of closure represent more general processes also operating in cognitive and personality domains by including in a single factor analysis perceptual tests and new tests requiring cognitive abilities resembling closure abilities operating in the perceptual domain. (RC)

TO VERIFY A PREVIOUSLY OBSERVED DEVELOPMENTAL INVERSION IN PROBLEM-SOLVING ABILITY AND TO EXPLORE PROBLEM-SOLVING STRATEGIES, RESEARCHERS GAVE A SET OF SEQUENTIAL-PATTERN RECOGNITION TESTS TO 316 CHILDREN, REPRESENTING NURSERY SCHOOL THROUGH SIXTH GRADE. EACH TEST CONSISTED OF FINDING TOKENS PLACED BEHIND 5 DOORS IN A PREDETERMINED PATTERN. THE…

The Test of Logical Thinking (TOLT) is a written test of cognitive development constructed to be logically equivalent to specific Piagetian tasks. It consists of 36 open-ended items administered in a one-to-one situation. Subjects were middle to upper class, predominantly white elementary school students. The 168 students were randomly drawn from…

The following methods are suggested to measure the comprehensibility of Children's Television Workshop productions: (1) comprehension tests inserted into the program; (2) dual audio testing--a technique which inserts comprehension questions into the empty spaces in the regular program audio track; and (3) program interruptions which permit…

Reported is a study designed to (1) describe the variations which occur in the attainment of cognitive objectives in high school chemistry, (2) identify patterns of achievement in terms of these cognitive objectives, and (3) investigate the relationship of achievement of these objectives and their patterns to certain personal, attitudinal, and…

Eight children from each of five age groups, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 years, were administered matrix tasks involving two nominal dimensions, color and shape. Nine stimulus cells and six attribute cells made up the apparatus. The attribute cells consisted of three colors and three geometric shapes; the stimulus cells made up a matrix consisting of the…