Teacher editions of four basal reading series used in the first, fourth, and sixth grades were analyzed to determine the extent of inclusion and explanation of the levels of questioning. Questions from the first two, middle two, and last two stories in each of the teacher editions were analyzed. All teacher editions examined recognized the…

Training sessions for the development of active critical thinking skills with the aim of improving the quality of student decision making prepares them for a future in a rapidly changing society. (JD)

Examples are given illustrating a facet of early learning involving insights into abstract thinking. Several learning theories examined fail to account for this phenomenon. (MP)

Reports a study involving 35 learning-disabled boys attending full-time remedial schools and 35 matched normal achievers to investigate whether learning-disabled children differ from normal achievers in terms of logical thought and whether they exhibit decalages in their acquisition of Piagetian concepts. (BD/BR)

Available from: British Medical Journal, 1172 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02134. In order to determine whether Central Nervous System irradiation effects intellectual abilities, 28 children in remission at least 2 years after completing chemotherapy for acute lymphoblastic leukemia were assessed on standardized psychological tests…

Describes steps involved in the construction of a 15-item test to measure formal reasoning in junior and senior high school students. From analysis, the author concludes that the test has face, convergent, and factorial validities. (CP)

A pretest-posttest research design was used with 104 first-grade children to determine if discrimination and classifactory activities would affect transition from preoperational to concrete stages. Findings showed the experimental group exhibited significantly greater transition than did the control group. (CP)

The relationship between a cognitive style variable, field-dependence-independence, and instructional treatments that differed in two dimensions of discovery learning, level of guidance and level of abstraction, was investigated with 116 prospective elementary teachers. As predicted, field-independent students did better with minimum guidance,…

This is the third in a sequence of three papers describing an investigation of fifth graders' ability to learn to distinguish between valid and fallacious inferences from simple conditional premises. This paper presents the research design and results. (MN)

Explains how teachers can initiate mapping experiences with young children by providing motor experiences inside and outside the classroom. Experiences should be followed by work with three-dimensional models, then with two-dimensional paper, and finally with lines. (Author)

Presents a developmental study of children's understanding and appreciation of figurative language. Results replicated previous findings that kindergarten children are capable of interpreting figurative language whereas appreciation appears to require increased cognitive sophistication. (JMB)

The development of children's comprehension of cause and effect relationships was studied in 68 kindergarten, first grade, and second grade children. (BRT)

Data from three studies with elementary and junior high school students are presented in support of the contention that facility in concrete operations is necessary and sufficient for competence in the simple syllogistic forms, while formal operations are required when dealing with conditional statements in certain more complex contexts.…

Two studies with first- and fifth-grade children in two learning tasks showed that preoperational children did not necessarily learn responses followed by a stimulus object previously instrumental in obtaining a reward, while postoperational subjects did. (Author/JMB)

This essay affirms that people are not, like insects, genetically compelled to live and work collectively. Above all, language separates us from the rest of the animal world, allowing us to depart from reflex activity to consider the ambiguous and unknown and formulate new ideas. (Text is in Spanish.) (CHK)