An examination of the reasons behind the strong evidence that practice in sentence combining leads to overall superiority in writing began with the development of a more precise syntactic instrument than had been used previously and a new set of criteria for rhetorical analysis which focused on unity, organization, succinctness, and cohesiveness.…

The focus of this paper is on some of the difficulties students experience in learning from texts and in solving other types of academic problems, because of their failure to distinguish between skills needed for everyday thinking and those needed for academic thinking. The paper discusses the types of processing problems children experience when…

In teaching people to think, a theory is needed about the thought process and about how it is modified by intervention. Most approaches to training people to think focus on an intermediary or mediating process. To explore the effectiveness of a group support training method in modifying cognitive style, the performance of female college student…

To investigate similarity judgements in different cultural contexts, the performance of two groups of children on seven similarity tasks and on two tests of metaphor was compared. The 45 Canadian and 45 Canadian-Greek children (ages 5, 8, and 11) had different cultural and linguistic backgrounds but common schooling experiences. The seven tasks…

This paper presents (1) data indicating the need to increase the percentage of higher cognitive questions in the instructional program, based upon research showing that questioning strategies are instrumental in improving comprehension; (2) data indicating that questions currently included in instructional programs are predominantly of the lower…

Past research on the development of referential communication abilities in children does not provide a basis for explaining precisely why communicative effectiveness increases. The common assumption is that developments in role-taking facilitate the child's ability to adapt to hearers. A reasonable alternative explanation is that a child's…

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…

Thirteen congenitally blind students (6-18 years old) who participated in a 2-year Piagetian-oriented remedial program experienced significant gains on 22 of 26 reasoning variables (as measured by a Piagetian battery), compared to a non-treatment group of Ss which achieved significant gains on seven of 26 variables. Results suggested the need for…

In this report, three theories of transitive inference are compared as they apply to the solution of linear syllogisms: a spatial theory, a linguistic theory, and a new mixed linguistic-spatial theory. Each theory is expressed in terms of an information-processing (flow chart) model and a mathematical model that quantifies the…

Interactions between metaphor comprehension and level of operational thought were examined to determine what advantages individuals at the formal operational level had in natural language tasks such as the understanding of figurative language. After 30 undergraduate students were classified as either late concrete, early formal, or late formal…

The term, "schema," used largely as a descriptive convenience rather than a theoretical guidepost in social psychology is examined through an analysis of its development, function, and structure. This paper articulates a model of schema development in adults by defining a schema as a representation of some stimulus domain and a set of…

Sixteen children (aged 14 to 26 months), who were reported by their parents to overextend, were tested for overextension in both language production and comprehension. The children were first asked to name each of a series of pictures of inappropriate exemplars of the words they were reported to overextend. Those words that were overextended, a…

THE THEME OF THIS PAPER IS THAT EVERY TEACHER IS A TEACHER OF READING WHEREVER AND WHENEVER THE SKILLS ARE NEEDED. SINCE THE READING CONSULTANT IS PRIMARILY CONCERNED WITH REMEDIATION, THE NEED FOR IMPLEMENTING READING SKILLS IN SUBJECT MATTER COURSES IS IN THE HANDS OF THE TEACHERS IN EACH OF THESE AREAS. THE TEACHING OF THE FUNDAMENTAL…

Rhetoric, reasoning, and reflection are discussed as the tools which enable a reader to distend the experience of reading to its greatest limits. Rhetoric is interpreted as the facility which allows the reader to understand both the necessary "how" and "what" of an author's work. Eleven cognitive processes used in written material are defined and…