The Situational Self-statement and Affective State Inventory, a research inventory comprised of five hypothetical situations involving interpersonal conflict, and a series of self-report measures of psychopathology were administered to 224 undergraduates to examine the correlational relationship between specific cognitions and affective states in…

Forty first-grade children and 40 fourth-grade children participated in a study that sought to determine if age-related increases in memory for prose are due, in part, to deliberate mnemonic strategies and if older children use the higher-order relations in prose more efficiently than do younger children. Each child listened to a tape-recorded…

The performance patterns of Mexican-American seventh-grade students on five mathematics tests were compared with those of a predominantly Anglo group of students. Measures included two tests of general mathematical ability (Five Dots and Necessary Arithmetic Operations), a test on division of whole numbers, a test on prime numbers, and a posttest…

From about age four to age eleven, a child's concept of "word" develops from a lack of conceptual differentiation about things and events to an awareness of words as meaningful elements in themselves. Piaget's theory of cognitive development offers a perspective from which this phenomenon can be evaluated. The preoperational and concrete…

Research on divergent thinking (mental activity directed to open-end problems for which there is no one correct answer) indicates that the characteristics associated with divergency (fluency of thinking, flexibility of thinking, originality, redefinition, and elaborating) are right brain functions. To assess right brain function and verbal…

Four males and four females from each of grades one through six served as subjects in an investigation of the development of recursive thought (imagining other people's thoughts). One half of the subjects were asked to tell what a little boy in a picture was thinking about various configurations of faces. The remaining subjects were told the…

This paper is a technical report of analyses carried out to determine the effects of parents' involvement in a prekindergarten program on their children's cognitive development. The research was part of a longitudinal study of the New York State Experimental Prekindergarten Program. A multiple linear regression approach was used to test hypotheses…

As part of a longitudinal study of the New York State Experimental Prekindergarten Program, the effect of degree of parental involvement in the program on children's cognitive development was examined. Parent involvement included employment in the program, school visits, home visits by school personnel, group meetings, and incidental contacts such…

A sequence of reasoning processes based on a combination of theories developed by Jean Piaget is presented. An applied theory of concept-teaching is derived from the restructuring of Piagetian theories on logical thought specifically concerned with the notions of the additive and multiplicative ordering of groups, and the four logic processes of…

This report presents two research studies. The first, an experiment using 176 fifth graders, tested three hypotheses: (1) When content is held constant across messages, different formats of a medium differentially call for mental skills. (2) Formats which call for the same skills in different ways affect learners differently. (3) The TV formats…

This experiment investigated the effect of children's successive encounters with a large scale environment on their subsequent reconstructions of that environment. Twenty children (10 boys, 10 girls) at each of three grade levels (kindergarten, two, and five) reconstructed from memory the spatial layout of buildings in a large model town. All…

When the context of instructional discourse maximizes the likelihood of interaction with preexisting knowledge structures, productive learning outcomes may be increased. In the present study, 44 undergraduate students who read a hierarchically structured text were asked to recall its contents immediately and again six weeks later. The generation…

A study was conducted in light of a neo-Piagetian theory of cognitive development to interpret the effect of priming executive schemes for describing relevant features in a referential communication task. Forty-eight 4-year-old children were divided into primed and nonprimed groups and were asked to describe in isolation a black and white…

Since the mid-1960s a new approach has dominated American research in the area of mathematics education -- information-processing theory. The author examines several examples of research in this new tradition and sketches the general features of an emerging information-processing psychology of teaching. Information-processing studies that employ…

This final report reviews research performed in two major areas--instructional theory, and development of a generalized maintenance trainer simulator. Five related research projects were carried out in the domain of instructional theory: (1) the effects of visual analogies of abstract concepts, (2) Markov decision models for instructional sequence…