A study examined prereaders' story processing strategies by assessing their performance on tasks that tapped their ability to (1) use story grammar and role playing, (2) retell a wordless picture book, (3) read a predictable book, (4) retell an oral story, (5) sequence pictured story events, and (6) fingerpoint-read a nursery rhyme. Parent…

Whether physical activity and verbal communication would affect kindergarten students' scores on the Metropolitan Readiness Tests (MRT) was investigated. Twenty subjects were administered Level I of the MRT when they entered kindergarten. For 5 days per week for 4 weeks, the 10 subjects in the experimental group worked at constructive play tasks…

This paper discusses how fourth- and eighth-grade students in rural Arkansas perceive other countries. Students in fourth grade (N=153) chose among 22 terms to describe Canada, China, Egypt, England, France, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Spain, and the United States. Eighth graders (N=90) were asked to describe separately a set of nations and…

This investigation is concerned with evaluating an instructional method based on Ausubel's description of expository teaching using advance organizers (AO) lessons. AO lessons are a method used to increase retention and transfer by identifying the general ideas that form the structure of a subject matter area. This study distinguishes between AO…

The Conceptual Learning and Development (CLD) Model suggests four successive levels of concept learning: (1) concrete--recognizing an object which has been encountered previously; (2) identity--recognizing a known object when it appears in a different spatial, time, or sensory perspective; (3) classificatory--generalizing that two items are alike…

Designed for integration into existing school curriculum, this is the fifth in a series of five career education curriculum kits for teachers of grades 4-8. Each kit pertains to one of five specified career education program goals. The goal for this curriculum kit is, "The students will develop physical and mental skills related to occupational…

Research supported by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation.

The current state of and opportunities for basic research related to child and adolescent development are described in this report. The document was prepared as a resource for developing the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development's 5-year plan of research for the years 1983-1987. Five broad areas of research are addressed: (1)…

The document contains 10 papers from the 1973 John Tracy Clinic (Los Angeles, California) Summer Session for teachers on communication skills for deaf/blind children. J. Efron, the author of "Teaching Communication Skills to Deaf/Blind Children--Which Method?" examines advantages and disadvantages of several methods of teaching communication…

The study was designed to demonstrate the effectiveness of diagnostic teaching with 70 children (6 to 14 years old) with learning and behavioral disorders and to investigate the administrative plan which is most efficient and effective for implementing diagnostic teaching. Ss were divided into three experimental groups--Experimental Group I with…

In l975, a longitudinal evaluation was begun of the New York State Experimental Prekindergarten Program to determine its effects on children's cognitive and non-cognitive development. The population consisted of 5,000 disadvantaged 4-year-olds enrolled in the program. The study provides evidence that the program had a general effect, not…

This study used 152 grade eight students ranging in age from 12 to 14 years from a suburban middle school in central New Jersey. The investigations gave particular attention to the identification of variables that represent understanding of fundamental mathematical structures. The first year of the research took place during the 1978-1979 school…

To further investigate the relationship between divergent thinking and bilingualism, 23 Anglos and 108 Mexican Americans from a semi-rural West Texas community and 24 Mexican Americans from San Antonio, enrolled in the fourth grade, of low socioeconomic status, and with an average age of 10 years 6 months, were divided into 5 experimental groups,…

Developmental patterns in one mode of formal reasoning (probabilistic reasoning) were examined in this research study, specifically: (1) to determine if developmental patterns of probabilistic reasoning could be confirmed using a large, diverse sample of subjects, and if they could be similar despite variations in the complexity of the reasoning…

The Pennsylvania Preschool Inventory (PPI) was developed as a straight-forward and efficient measure of the relative cognitive development of the young child, offering an alternative to more complicated, elaborate assessment instruments. Results of the inventory are potentially relevant to both current and future school success of children between…