Students (N=22) enrolled in secondary school biology were evaluated for their abilities to use: combinatorial logic; correlational reasoning; separation and control of variables; exclusion of irrelevant variables; proportional reasoning; and probabilistic reasoning. Each student responded individually to six Piagetian tasks designed to measure…

A study of the development of abstract noun definitions in children and adolescents had as its subjects 120 students evenly divided into age groups of 10-, 14-, and 18-year-olds, randomly selected from students scoring in the 40th to 88th percentiles on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (for 10-year-olds) and the Tests of Achievement and Proficiency…

Children, aged 4-8 were given 2-term relational problems to test the hypothesis that only older children can process sentences as propositions and realize their logical implications. Results indicated even the youngest children could perform the task. (ST)

The relationship of particular learning styles and plausible reasoning ability of 110 subjects from 6th, 7th, and 8th grade was examined. Data were compiled on a plausible reasoning test and on a Learning Style Inventory with four subscales: (1) Concrete Experience (CE), (2) Reflective Observation (RO), (3) Abstract Conceptualization (AC), and (4)…

One of the most typical ways in which people learn is by inferring general rules from examples. In recent years, significant progress has been made toward understanding how learning from examples can occur, determining when it does occur, and identifying conditions that promote it. This paper reviews these results and then suggests a program of…

The philosophical roots of the concept of lifelong learning are considered in relation to the views of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. They pioneered in their analyses of intellectual development and in the importance of the use of the mind throughout the life span. Plato and Aristotle added metaphysical arguments to support their systems of…

It is hypothesized that certain mental structures are related to certain teaching skills. These structures are identified as combinatorial logic, essential to planning lessons, and hypothetical reasoning, an important aid in analyzing lessons. These formal thinking abilities should result in greater improvement during practice and later teaching.…

Cognitive development as it progresses from concrete to abstract thinking is discussed as it relates to adolescent youth and the early secondary curriculum. Piagetian tests administered to a group of freshman and sophomore high school students revealed that many had difficulty with those scholastic activities requiring formal reasoning. Three…

Hitherto, theories of similarity have restricted themselves to judgments of what might be called literal similarity. A central thesis of this paper is that a complete account of similarity needs also to be sensitive to nonliteralness, or metaphoricity, an aspect of similarity statements that is most evident in similes, but that actually underlies…

This is one of a series that is a collection of translations from the extensive Soviet literature of the past 25 years on research in the psychology of mathematics instruction. It also includes works on methods of teaching mathematics directly influenced by the psychological research. Selected papers and books considered to be of value to the…

Four prime time television programs--"Charlie's Angels,""Little House on the Prairie,""Grizzly Adams," and "Lou Grant" --were rated by university students for their portrayal of moral reasoning and values. Data were obtained from three episodes of each program by randomly assigning raters to one of two viewing groups, both of which used an…

An experiment concerning children's conceptions of price was conducted to investigate the influence of the context of a problem on its apprehension. A total of 120 children of several age groups (nursery school, grades 2, 4, and 6) were interviewed individually. An initial question was asked ("Why does a bun cost about one Swedish…

The purposes of this experiment were: (1) to examine the development of categorical representations by comparing the performance of children of various ages to adults, and (2) to compare the internal representations of basic level and superordinate categories. Subjects were 48 children (in second, fourth and sixth grades) and 16 adults. The…

Reading lessons were observed, taped, and analyzed to determine how teachers' questioning strategies contribute to students' ability to comprehend materials read. The kinds of thinking elicited by teachers' questions were investigated by means of a classification scheme developed which included recognition, recall, translation, conjecture,…

A theory of the nature of mental abilities is presented. In this theory, mental abilities are hierarchically organized into four progressively deeper levels--the levels of composite tasks, subtasks, information-processing components, and information-processing metacomponents. Composite tasks can be decomposed into subtasks, subtasks into…