Life history interview tracked the movement of five middle-class women attending classes through a continuing education center for women. The center facilitated their movement through developmental stages but hampered their movement between stages, their abandonment of old social roles, and their construction of new roles. (BJV)

Investigated effects of changing the level of motor planning demands in simple drawing tasks for which children aged 5-11 years completed or copied squares and diamonds. Results were consistent with previous studies. Low planning demands resulted in less difference between square and diamond performance than did tasks demanding higher planning.…

Discusses the findings of a recent study concerning the ability of an infant to see an object as a symbol. Reports that infants between 36 and 39 months old significantly outperformed informed infants between 30 and 32 months old on a symbolic task. (TW)

Reports on a study in which the symbolic relation between a scale model and the larger space that it represents was displayed by two groups of young children. Three-year-old children outperformed 2.5-year-olds in finding an object in a room after seeing an analogous object hidden in a model. (TW)

Examines three major aspects of child development--motor, cognitive, and psychological--and their influence on physical health. Suggests a beginning framework for examining the relationship between development and health, and proposes that a developmental perspective be added as a fourth dimension to the commonly employed three-dimensional…

Summarizes recent research which attempted to discover what children of different ages know about the appearance-reality distinction and related phenomena. Findings show that what helps children grasp the distinction is an increased cognizance of the fact that people are sentient subjects who have mental representations of objects and events. (PS)

Administered Children's Depression Index to 304 elementary and secondary school students. Found that 21 percent of students reported mild to moderate levels and seven percent reported severe levels of depression. Females reported more overall depression than did males. Results suggest that females tend to internalize difficulties while males…

Argues that Susan Sugarman's article in this issue contains some valid criticism of assumptions in developmental psychology, but that some of her conclusions regarding other assumptions need to be questioned. Suggests that many problems raised by Sugarman would disappear if developmental psychologists concentrated on children's early achievements…

This article presents a broad ranging philosophical and theoretical argument for improving the education of young children through a greater understanding of developmental child psychology. Notes that play is essential for individual mental development, and must be used in educational settings. Maintains that pure scientific research is simply a…

Evaluates some possible reasons for the occurrence and eventual correction of children's naming errors in an experiment in which two-, four-, and six-year-olds learned two artificial object names in succession. (HOD)

Compares two types of semantic development (the acquisition of disappearance words and success-failure words) to performance on two types of cognitive tasks (object-permanence and means-ends tasks) among infants. (HOD)

Involving second, fourth, sixth, eighth, and tenth graders and undergraduates, three experiments evaluated the prediction that representations of knowledge of the weeks and months of the year develop from a verbal-list stage to a stage at which image representations are present. Results are interpreted as supporting the two-stage model and appear…

Noting that while formal operational thinking is essential to sociological learning, a majority of college freshmen are not yet fully formal thinkers. Maintains that introductory sociology courses must foster formal thinking in addition to teaching sociological content. Draws implications of revising goals and objectives to meet students' needs.…

This article reviews the major components of Viktor Lowenfeld's approach to art education, devoting specific attention to the misconceptions often attributed to his use of developmental stages. Notes that Lowenfeld was not the first individual to describe developmental stages in art learning and promotes a more accurate interpretation of how…

Tested two hypotheses: (1) formal reasoning is required to balance simple one-step equations; and (2) formal reasoning plus sufficient mental capacity are required to balance many-step equations. Independent variables included intellectual development, mental capacity, and degree of field dependence/independence. With 25 subjects, significance was…