After opening with a 13-page review of the literature, the document's main emphasis is on the three experiments included in this report. The specific rationale, procedures, and results of the three studies comprise the major portion of the document. The general purpose of Experiment 1 was to ascertain the effects of prior relevant subject matter…

Reported is a study to relate pupils' experience background and the effects of an advance organizer to his ability to understand scientific concepts. The study is based on Ausubel's subsumption theory, which states that the understanding of new learning material can be facilitated if the student has some background information which subsumes the…

This paper contends that human organisms are not qualitatively different from infra-human ones. The same principles apply to the acquisition, maintenance and weakening of complex verbal skills as mathematics as to rats pressing bars or pigeons pecking windows. Two aspects of child research are assessment and training. Assessment involves…

In this book Piaget considers the way children learn about the world. He addresses such questions as the following: How does a child learn to perceive the world around him? How, for example, does he learn that by grasping an object, he can pull it towards him, or that a ball of clay, flattened, is no smaller than it was before? How does he learn…

Letter-letter, letter-number, and number-letter paired associates were used in this A-B, B-C, A-C study. There were two A-C lists, the positive-transfer stimulus-items of one became the negative-transfer stimulus-items of the other, and vice versa. Twenty subjects were included and each learned one A-C list. The main effects included, among…

Fatalism as measured by Rotter's internal-external locus of control scale is the degree to which a person generally believes that events affecting his life are largely determined by other forces rather than by his own efforts. The purpose of this paper is to examine behavioral science theory concerning fatalism, and develop and test which types of…

This paper focuses on the importance of play for a child's physical, emotional, cognitive, and social development. Three major purposes of the report are: (1) to persuade those concerned with the education of young children that play is an essential activity for children's well-being and should be facilitated at home and in the classroom, (2) to…

These proceedings emphasize multidisciplineary theory and research having implications for behavioral science and/or education. The contributions deal with one or more of the following questions: (1) How can one characterize the knowledge structures which underlie behavior associated with subject matter disciplines such as mathematics and…

The use of equivalent-age children as tutors was investigated, and the cognitive changes of these tutors was examined. All first and second grade boys at two elementary schools were administered a pretest, and all those in a transitional stage of development between non-conservation and conservation of substance were selected for inclusion in the…

This report presents research concerned with two information-processing constructs, "cognitive strategies" and "cognitive styles." Study one analyzes thinking-aloud protocols obtained from a female undergraduate doing anagram problems. Several major strategies are described, along with basic "Operators" subject used to construct and modify…

This study investigates effects of different instructional methods on positional numeration systems. It involved prospective elementary teachers and assessed (1) understanding, (2) performance, and (3) transference of numeration concepts. The effects were measured by the Test On Numeration Systems (TONS). During each of two semesters, three…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the use of IQ as a measure of learning rate with children of similar ethnic origin but different socioeconomic backgrounds. The theoretical basis for this experiment was Jensen and Rohwer's distinction between developmental rate and learning rate. Specifically, a dimension abstracted oddity task was…

The first section of this paper which is the second on the same topic recapitulates the assessment of behavioral objectives originally stated in Part I, essentially to serve as a contrast to the "Dewey model" which states that goals should be determined "by" the students rather than "for" them, and hence that ends…

Eight experiments are described in this report. In experiment 1, four and five year olds were presented four verbal discrimination (VD) lists. For three of the lists all correct items were either conceptually, acoustically, or affectively similar. The fourth was a control list. The conceptual list facilitated VD learning. Experiment 2 indicated…

Incorporated are abstracts of papers presented at the annual conference of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching held in Detroit, Michigan, March 27-29, 1973. The papers were presented during a three-day period. The first day's presentations related to the topics of simulation techniques, pictorial communication research,…