Investigated the general relationship between children's performance on social and physical measures of cognitive functioning, possible sex differences in performance on the two types of tasks, and the relationship between boys' and girls' performances on these tasks and age and IQ. (SDH)

Five articles and two columns reprinted from 1984 and 1985 issues of "The Computing Teacher" address various ethical and legal issues involved in computer use. In "A Question of Ethics," Larry S. Hannah and Charles B. Matus suggest guidelines for dilemma discussion in the classroom to address social and moral issues and to help…

Many educators assume that close links between schooling and everyday experience are necessary for students to be motivated and to learn. That assumption should be reconsidered. To promote equality of opportunity and to develop scientific understanding, schools should help students break with everyday experience. Cognitive researchers recognize…

Two studies are presented which investigate the influence of various toy structures on the frequency of individual fantasy play forms in 3- to 6-year-old children. In the first study, the effects of high-realistic/high-complexity and low-realistic/low-complexity toy structures were compared. There were significant main effects for the factor toy…

A study was designed to identify and clarify relationships between naturally observed, task-measured, and elicited instances of kindergarten children's role-taking, prosocial behavior and sharing behavior. An additional goal of the study was to illuminate possible relationships between prosocial behavior and children's temperamental…

A study involving 26 children, aged five to eight years, employed a clinical interview method to examine the children's recognition and knowledge of rule violations in communication. The rules, derived from H. P. Grice's "be cooperative" principle, referred mainly to the maxim "be perspicuous, unequivocal, clear, and…

Some older adults experience difficulty in decentering their own viewpoint on tasks requiring spatial and communicative role-taking. To examine the social perspective-taking skills of older adults and the kinds of strategies older people would suggest to solve social dilemmas, adults were interviewed about their typical interpersonal problems. A…

Social cognitive abilities were evaluated in 23 deaf students (3 to 6 years old) through tasks requiring spatial perspective taking, cooperation, and receptive language. As hypothesized, language ability proved to be a prediction of both other variables, with the high correlation between language and perspective taking indicating a definite…

Using computer controlled text presentation that permitted the measurement of reading time for individual sentences, a study tested two hypotheses concerning how schemata guide reading comprehension. The focusing hypothesis suggested that the schemata activated by the reader's perspective might identify relevant information to which additional…

Several related studies of empathy and altruism in children were conducted to answer such questions as: (1) What are the very early signs of empathy and altruism in children? (2) What kinds of transformations in these behaviors take place during development? and (3) How do rearing experiences influence these behaviors? Data related to these…

A model of identity formation, based on the cognitive developmental stages of social perspective-taking, was tested to determine if identity is achievable through cognitive strategies of considering the self in relation to friends, family, peers, and society. Two separate studies, one involving college students (N=28) and one involving high school…

Three questions were addressed in this study: 1) What are the levels of relationships among level of moral development, attitudes toward teaching and role specific self-concept in a group of entering teacher education candidates? 2) What differences exist between elementary and secondary candidates in areas of moral development, teacher attitudes…

Three "deep structures" of the literary curriculum (contexts within which teachers teach literature) have been identified: (1) the imitative structure, in which students learn about the background of the text, (2) the analytic structure, and (3) the generative approach, dealing with a work's effect on readers. While experienced literary critics…

Empathy has been defined in a number of different ways. Some, such as Sarbin and Flavell, have emphasized the cognitive aspects of empathy by defining it as the ability to take-the-role-of-the-other. Others, such as Stewart, Borke, Iannotti, and Feshbach, have emphasized the affective processes involved in empathy. Although it is difficult,…

This study investigated the interrelationships among the development of role-taking skills, moral judgments, and sharing behavior of boys and girls in K-3. A total of 160 lower middle class white children (20 boys and 20 girls from each grade) participated in the study. Data were collected on four measures: (1) sharing candy with a friend, (2)…