Supports the proposition that anxiety over intellectual performance is one antecedent of a reflective cognitive disposition. (Author/WY)

Acceptance of the concept of man as a rational animal is fundamental to an understanding of what it means to become human. (JH)

"A partial replication and extension of Bruner and Kenney's (1966) study of the concept of proportionality was run with 5- and 7-year-old children... Results demonstrated importance of avoiding verbal ambiguity in the investigation of nonverbal cognitive competence. (Author)

Addresses the respective roles of prototypes and specific exemplars in children's categorization behavior. The ability of children and adults to abstract and recognize figural prototypes was examined using a prototype-plus-distortions design. (Author/RH)

The effectiveness of a program, varying in presentation format, in promoting the acquisition and generalization of a verbal abstraction strategy was evaluated for 80 mildly retarded Ss (mean age 12 to 14 years). Although the acquisition and near generalization of the verbal abstraction strategy was advanced, no far generalization was observed.…

Tests semantic integration and frequency tally models of memory among 60 first-, third-, and fifth-grade children. Data from third and fifth graders show different patterns of results for regular and anomalous stories. The true-inference error rate was significantly greater than the error rates for false premise and false-inference sentences in…

Results showed that experimentally produced variations in the person orientation of three nine-year-old female confederates affected the socialization techniques employed by 24 female college students who were attempting to elicit altruistic behavior from the children. (JMB)

Syllogisms with missing conclusions, missing minor and major premises, as well as missing negative conclusion and missing conclusion to a class chain, were given to 160 gifted children (20 each from ages 4-11) to investigate the order of difficulty of certain principles of logic and the age at which these principles are acquired. (MP)

The relationship between a student's stated preference for solving a problem and his/her actual problem methodology, concrete or abstract, was studied. Comparisons were made between formal and nonformal students. (MP)

Two studies used a modification of the weakly interpretive scoring method of Langford and D'Cruz to examine judicial and legislative reasoning. Findings were in accord with modified versions of Piaget's and Kohlberg's views and contradicted Gibbs' theory. There were three stages of legislative reasoning between 7 and 21 years: heteronomy or…

A study conjectured that individuals make mental models of events when they reason from premises involving temporal relations. Several experiments using school children and university students as subjects found that problems that required one mental model elicited more correct responses than problems that required multiple mental models. (BC)

Studies 6- to 8-year olds' responses to sliced task, standard and choices were discontinuous quantities, and non-sliced task, standard was continuous and choices were discontinuous quantities in order to discover whether children use half boundary in ratio comparisons between continuous and discontinuous quantities. Reveals that "dhalf" plays a…

Proverb comprehension through reading was examined in 42 preadolescent students, 24 of whom were identified as "proficient readers," and 18 as "less proficient readers." Comprehension on both unfamiliar concrete and abstract proverbs was associated with reading proficiency, word knowledge, and analogical reasoning. (Contains references.)…

Presents a study in which some students in grades 3-6 were taught scientific concepts using instructional analogies while others received expository texts not containing analogies. Indicates that students who received the analogical text demonstrated better inferential reasoning than students who received the non-analogical text. (Contains 57…

Discusses the level of knowledge, understanding, and ability relative to mathematics for the college graduate in the 21st century. Focuses on mathematical literacy and abstraction such as the definition of abstraction, difficulties in addressing abstraction, and one approach to helping students learn to address abstraction. (Contains 12…