Recent research studies suggest a relationship between an individual's level of competence in the use of language and of nonlinguistic communication and that person's ability to function competently in society. This document reviews the theories and definitions related to the concept of communicative competence, discusses the cognitive and…

Research involving split-brain patients has shown that the two hemispheres of the brain process information differently. The left side of the brain is more analytical, the right side is more holistic, taking in overall characteristics rather than specific detail. This reserach can be applied to the educational process in several ways. The concepts…

Described are procedures used to assess reasoning in congenitally blind students. It is explained that the Piagetian Battery of Reasoning Assessments for concrete and formal or abstract thought measures the following basic abilities: reversability of thought, classifacatory thought, spatial orientation, and mental imagery. (CL)

The role of linguistic relativity was examined through the use of multidimensional scaling (MDS). Direct pair comparisons of the similarity among a set of translated equivalent lexical items dealing with the mass media were made by subjects monolingual in English or French or bilingual using either of the languages. Using MDS as a measure of…

This paper discusses research on age related aspects of children's processing and comprehension of the narrative content of family oriented television programs. In one study, the temporal integration necessary to make inferences about audiovisually presented information was examined in 254 second, fifth and eighth grade children. Subjects were…

This report describes a study conducted to discover whether children with language delay would respond differently from normal children on two identically itemed tests of knowledge of adjectives and prepositions, one of which using objects as stimuli and the other using pictorial stimuli. It was hypothesized that the test using objects would be…

This paper examines the interrelationship between children's acquisition and use of symbols and the development of imaginative play. The paper focuses on the use of pretend play as an expression of the child's capacity for symbolic functioning and as an index of intellectual development. The first section of the paper reviews developmental changes…

This paper describes the proceedings of a meeting of 20 student personnel professionals, practitioners and educators from across the U.S. They met to develop a conceptual organizational pattern for establishing student development programs. The paper describes not only some of the outcomes, but also the process by which they evolved. It was felt…

This study is designed to investigate the relationship between the extent of visualization of poetically elicited mental images (V) and five other variables involved in response to poetry: extent of verbal interpretation of the meaning of poetry; extent of recall of poetry; accuracy of recall of poetry; extent of liking of poetry; and level of…

This paper reports two experiments which examined processes involved in children's ability to solve class inclusion problems of the form, "Are there more A' (subclass) or more A (class)?" In the first experiment a total of 216 children in age groups 5, 7 and 9 years were placed in three conditions which were designed to distinguish…

This study was conducted to determine if fifth-grade students can significantly improve their use of logical analysis through a suitable instructional unit taught under ordinary classroom conditions. Concrete teaching materials were developed to familiarize students with the distinction between the valid inference patters--Modus Ponendo Ponens and…

Albert Michotte, known primarily for his research in perception, also carried out several experiments in logical memory (conceptual or intellectual memory). He was strongly influenced by Kulpe, feeling that the thought processes were autonomous, in contradiction to more traditional and elementary conceptions of mental activity. His experiments,…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the development of organizational processes for both verbal and spatial stimulus materials within an information processing framework. Children in grades 2 and 4 and adults were tested for their ability to report letter strings reflecting various orders of approximation to English and various dot…

This study was conducted to determine if the inclusion of a required objective attainment condition would increase student achievement when instruction was structured by a program that utilized student selected objectives. The following null hypothesis was formulated: no significant difference exists in the number of student selected objectives…

As part of a long term project relating individual differences in performance on paper and pencil tests of intellectual aptitude and achievement to differences observed in laboratory studies of cognition, data have been collected comparing test scores with simple choice reaction times. The three studies summarized here suggest that the…