"Teachable Moments" are teaching aids about global perspectives in education. Number 1 describes an activity that lets students feel what it is like to be a refugee. Number 2 involves discussion of why people are hungry, rich, or poor. Number 3 helps students learn to deal with experts' opinions on global problems. Number 4 uses…

Based on the Carnegie Foundation study of baccalaureate programs, which found that many colleges are confused as to their mission and are fragmenting the disciplines into smaller and smaller pieces, a case is made for revising the higher education curriculum. Coursework is fragmented because of the growth of specialized fields within the…

A study investigated some of the ways in which phenomena are perceived and translated into speech, especially in the assignment of agents in a given situation. Subjects were 16 adults with infant children. The adults were shown the Visual Cliff series of pictures of an infant crawling to its mother across a glass sheet covering an open space with…

Results of two experiments support the finding of developmental change in the role of representation in perspective-taking tasks. Experiment 1, which involved 80 first-grade students with a mean age of 6.5 years, crossed task characteristics and response modes. Subjects either imagined an observer's movement around a fixed array or imagined an…

Cognitive perspective-taking has attracted considerable attention in the mainstream developmental literature, and is most commonly studied under the rubric of Theory of Mind. The current article reviews the levels of understanding of informational states that are believed to underlie cognitive perspective-taking from this conceptual framework. An…

This study examined the relationship between parents' use of a person oriented disciplinary technique and their children's use of moral intentionality. Person oriented parents were characterized as those who emphasize their children's needs and intentions, in contrast to position oriented parents who expect children to adhere to socially accepted…

This paper describes the philosophical perspectives that individuals bring to their study of the communication process. These perspectives, called presuppositions, include conceptions of reality (existential, essential, contextual), ways of understanding knowledge (objective, subjective, intersubjective), and types of value systems (well-defined…

It was hypothesized that both parental affection and the emphasizing of the feelings, thoughts, and intentions of others in discipline techniques are related to young children's cooperativeness. The cooperative behavior of 31 children was measured by both naturalistic observation and behavior ratings. Parents were interviewed and responded to five…

This study investigates the moral development of thirty 5-year-old children in Montessori and traditional preschools. Data for the study were derived from five sources: an intelligence test; a perspective taking task; an altruism/helping task; an altruism/sharing task; and an interview for exploring moral reasoning. Two 30 to 45 minute sessions…

Empathic distress refers to the empathic response to another's pain, anxiety, or sadness. Empathic distress must be viewed as only one component of a person's response when observing someone in distress. Studies of empathy should be designed to rule out or control the non-empathic components insofar as possible. The importance of perception and…

A study was conducted to develop and test the empirical validity of a middle-range theory designed to explain and predict the relationship between speech communication egocentrism and reading achievement. The theory predicts an inverse relationship between elementary school children's levels of speech communication egocentrism and reading…

This study examined the correlation between the egocentricity in childhood and the artist's consideration of the viewer's perspective. A method was devised to evaluate drawings made by 82 children between 5 and 7 years old, according to criteria of comprehensibility. Verbal and nonverbal behaviors accompanying the drawings performance were…

In this study of perspective taking and moral judgment 20 children (10 boys and 10 girls) at each age level between 4 and 10 years were given Feffer's Social Role-Taking Task, a spatial perspective-taking task and Damon's Test of Positive Justice. Investigated were: (1) the specific developmental sequences for role taking, spatial…

Concluded that the 44 fourth-grade subjects were not highly proficient at adapting messages either to listeners or to readers, but that such adaptation in writing lagged behind adaptation in speaking. (DD)

In an analysis of the National Teacher Examination (NTE), the authors found that the weighted common examination scores are significant predictors of effective teaching (student achievement), if the variance shared with teacher race is included. (Author/MJB)