This document focuses on a series of studies that viewed aspects of conditional reasoning. The investigations were concerned with the processes children use to acquire patterns of deductive inference and logical relationships pertaining to propositional reasoning. The first experiment, involving 96 children each in grades 2 and 5, investigated the…

Basic writing teachers can make use of the Learning Cycle teaching technique to design exploration and invention activities with which their students can practice analytical writing. The Learning Cycle approach is based on Piagetian theory and involves a three-phase process of exploration, invention, and discovery. In the exploration phase…

The papers contained in this document were originally presented at the May 1978 conference on Modeling Mathematical Cognitive Development sponsored by the Models of Learning Mathematics Working Group of the Georgia Center for the Study of Learning and Teaching Mathematics. Most have been revised to reflect comments and suggestions made at the…

A cognitive approach to the interrelation of writing and reading assumes that production and comprehension of written text depend upon cognitive and affective schemata used in concert by a writer or reader to produce or encode, store, and retrieve text information. Both comprehending and composing are basic, complex, interactive processes with…

Intended as a chapter in "Carmichael's Manual of Child Psychology," this paper provides an overview and interpretation of the work already completed on children's learning, remembering, and understanding with a major concentration on academic cognition. The first part of the paper provides a brief overview of the principal trends of the 1970s and…

This review of the literature on reading theories is built around three components: an explication of each theory, an evaluation of the theory based on an examination of its internal and external coherence and correspondence, and an application of the theory to a child's reading. The literature is organized around discussions of 12 benchmarks…

Educators have relied on the work of Jean Piaget for many years in an effort to understand the intellectual capabilities of children and adolescents. Piaget, however, did not consider instruction and school experiences to be factors that influenced children's conceptual development. The Soviet psychologist, Lev Vygotsky, proposed the opposite:…

The adoption of developmental approaches could reinforce or aggravate certain inequities in schools. Three developmental practices embody potentially harmful inclinations: (1) the tendency to adopt the end state of a developmental theory (such as Kohlberg's) as an educational goal, thereby imposing a restrictive model of learning on culturally…

The performance of good and poor readers was compared on a series of three visually presented paired associate tasks varying the verbal codability level of response items. Performance of the 32 poor readers was significantly lower than that of the 32 good readers across all three tasks. There were no differences between good and poor readers in…

Several concepts detailed in Gestalt psychology/therapy appear to have a close relationship with many concepts being applied in bilingual education. The primary contribution of Gestalt psychology to learning theory in the U.S. is an emphasis on perception and reintegration of relationships within an organized whole. To the teacher this means that…

This document focuses on one child's skip counting methods. The pupil, a second grade student at Steuben School, in Kankakee, Illinois, was interviewed as she made several attempts at counting twenty-five poker chips on a circular piece of paper. The interview was part of a larger study of "Children's Conceptions of Number and Numeral,"…

The purpose of this document is to survey at least some of the important research literature on solving linear equations in order to identify information that might suggest ways to improve teaching effectiveness. The studies that are examined employ a wide range of research techniques, are based often on quite different perspectives, and span over…

The two main objectives of the present study were to get a better understanding of sixth-graders' solution processes with respect to arithmetic word problems and to investigate the possibility of improving children's problem-solving ability through instruction. As background for the study, a hypothetical model of the problem-solving process was…

This document briefly reviews four areas of educational inquiry. The first section is concerned with definitions of the terms "spatial ability" and "visual imagery"; the second is concerned with training studies in which attempts have been made to improve spatial ability or to encourage greater use of visual imagery in problem…