Beilin examines the previous three papers. In explaining cognitive development, social learning theory fails to account for rule invariance in the face of capricious and informationally impoverished experience, does not explain the acquisition of abstract rule systems, and offers less flexibility than Piaget's explanations based on operations and…

A series of studies involving deaf and hearing impaired children was conducted to assess imagination, originality, and abstract thinking. (Author/SBH)

Shows a wide variety of task performance ability. Supports the hypothesis that the tasks require the use of the same or a unified set of cognitive processes. (RL)

A colliding spheres type of experiment is used with several hundred 4-12 grade students to test for knowledge of the concept of controlling variables. Results support the contention that the concept is developed gradually during the concept stage but not fully attained until around 14 years of age. (CP)

A 5-trial social-conditional reasoning task was administered to 80 children between the ages of 3 and 6 years. The results indicated that by 4 years of age children are able to reason from a premise to its logical conclusion in reasoning about the probable behavior of others. (JMB)

Investigated proportional reasoning of a select group of older, college-bound adolescents on a task set in a geometric/spatial context with a multiple-proportion, multiplicative structure. Sex-related differences and the influence of course experience in mathematics and science were also investigated. (JN)

Mathematically gifted boys (N=77) and girls (N=62) completed a mathematics reasoning test, a verbal reasoning test, a measure of spatial ability, and a personality test. Findings indicated that boys not only have higher mathematical reasoning ability than girls, but also that this ability is the single best predictor of their mathematical…

Describes three experiments that tested autistic children's nonverbal and verbal categorization abilities. Concludes that autistic children do not suffer a specific cognitive deficit in ability to categorize and form abstract concepts. (HOD)

Describes teaching students how to evaluate materials containing judgments based on a modification of a model by J. E. Sparks and C. Johnson called the pyramid of reading power. (EL)

Lawson's test was used with 66 ninth grade and 63 tenth grade students. Results show: that boys outperformed girls; a small correlation between achievement in science and mathematics and the Lawson test; and that Israeli students achieved significantly higher than United States students on the Piagetian skills measured by the test. (Author/JN)

This study examined whether postprimary education enhances informal reasoning skills, operationalized as skill in constructing arguments about everyday issues. Eight subject groups, balanced for six, ranged over high school, college, graduate school, and nonstudents with or without bachelor's degrees. (Author/BS)

Data from 60 observations of 10 teachers and 10 each of their students showed that type/quality of teaching strategy predicted 37 percent of variance in engagement and that the more indirect the teaching strategy, the greater the students' involvement in learning tasks. Implications of these and other findings are discussed. (Author/JN)

A lesson on the French Revolution illustrates how reading, writing, reasoning, and researching skills can be integrated into history instruction. (RM)

Contends that current efforts to resolve the crisis in science education will have very little impact on the problem as a whole. Suggests that preservice and inservice teacher education programs focus on helping teachers grasp subject matter and their capacity for abstract, logical reasoning. (JN)

A study of a group of Australian primary student teachers' reasoning ability and its relationship to prior science studies, science elective choice during teacher training, and integrated process skill achievement in a preservice science education course, are discussed, as are their implications regarding their effectiveness in teaching science at…