Viewing language acquisition as the product of a biased learner who takes advantage of the information available from a variety of sources in his or her environment, this book provides a new way of thinking about the process of language comprehension. The analysis in the book borrows insights from theories about the development of mental models,…

Investigations of changes of conceptions during physics instruction are the logical and necessary next step to follow the successful international research on students' pre-instructional conceptions. This paper reviews theoretical issues, selected content-specific results, and general hypotheses. It is oriented towards explicit cognitive…

The Western Australian Science Education Association is an informal group which meets annually for a conference. This document contains the proceedings of the 1994 conference. Papers included were: (1) "Relationship Between Cognitive Style and Students' Proportional Reasoning Ability" (Ayo Akatugba); (2) "Alternative Modes of…

The outcomes of collaboration provide an incomplete and potentially misleading picture of cognitive change, one that is clarified by examining the collaborative processes themselves. Results from a study illustrate the dangers of focusing solely on the consequences of collaboration and emphasize why the analysis of collaborative processes is…

This study examined college students' ability to reason about everyday issues. Previous studies are reviewed and it is concluded that issues studied in the past were often not truly "everyday." For this study, 30 students responded to 10 issues, including 4 personal and 4 personally relevant political issues. Students circled one of two positions…

Piaget's studies clearly highlight two qualitative advances made during the preoperational period. The first is the breakthrough of representational intelligence, beginning around 2 years of age. The second is the emergence of coordinated representational thought, beginning around 4 years of age. This paper focuses on the second advance, which…

A central component in the young child's construction of a number system is an understanding of correspondence. Although current research demonstrates that preschool children use correspondence in a variety of tasks, the nature of the relationship between the use of correspondence action patterns and the use of correspondence as a quantifier is…

The results of a study of the meiosis models utilized by individuals at varying levels of expertise while reasoning about the process of meiosis are presented. Based on these results, the issues of sources of misconceptions/difficulties and the construction of a sound understanding of meiosis are discussed. Five individuals from each of three…

This paper describes a computer model that simulates the way children develop the reasoning skills of transitive inference and the construction of ordered sets. The computer model begins from general operations, such as setting and removing goals, storing and retrieving information, comparing elements to find matches, reading premises, and giving…

This study examined how change occurs in infant gestural communication. Five infants were videotaped once a week from 10 to 12 months and twice a week from 12 to 15 months during play sessions with their mothers in a laboratory playroom. These sessions consisted of 10 minutes of a structured play context in which infants were seated at a table at…

This study examined the influence of misleading information on children's memory of a real-life event. After participating in a play session, 10 three-year-old children and 10 six-year-old children heard a narrative that included inaccurate information about the play session. The children were then presented with items from the play session (event…

This study investigated the relationship of cognitive developmental changes to physiological and anatomical changes by measuring both types of data within the same subjects. Cortical electrical activity was measured in 24 males between 10 and 12 years of age. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from midline scalp electrodes during a…

This paper summarizes a project to determine the helpfulness of constructive/developmental theory in studying effective leadership. Grounded in social science research conducted by Piaget, Kohlberg, Perry, and others, the constructive/developmental leadership model has four stages. In the imperial stage, the individual's frames of reference are…

A study was conducted to categorize the questions found in the reading skills development books used in Maryland's community colleges according to Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. The study sought to determine the number of questions per taxonomy category; whether there was a significant difference between observed and expected…

The primary aims of this paper are to (1) clarify what is meant by an action theory perspective on the study of human development, and (2) report a series of developmental studies focusing on social cognition. In particular, it is pointed out that theories, methodologies, and empirical strategies realize an action theory perspective if human…