Argues against the claim that Piaget's theory of formal thought is invalid when used in learning high school chemistry, and suggests a way to test its validity. (GA)

Discusses the importance of developing students' understanding of certain spatial aspects of important concepts. Piaget's contributions to the development of spatial conceptualization are included. Some examples for applying spatial techniques in earth sciences, physics, and chemistry are also presented. (HM)

The ADAPT program for freshmen emphasizes building an experiential base in introductory courses before moving to abstract formulations. The goal is to develop thinking processes that are integrated with the student's experiences. Students in the ADAPT program outperformed two comparison groups on a variety of thinking tasks. (Author)

Focuses on the utility of well-formulated theory in conducting research, and demonstrates that the problem of transfer of learning is still a tough and subtle one. (Editor/RK)

Children aged 6 through 9 made drawings of cubes and simple abstract designs, with or without looking at their hand. Copying errors and differences between the age groups were discussed in terms of visual realism (perspective drawing) compared with intellectual realism (structural essentials copied without a unified perspective view). (CTM)

Children and undergraduate students were studied to expose "structure-neutral" interpretations of logical propositions involving universal affirmatives. Successes with true and false questions and with four different syllogistic forms having three content types were compared. Age-related differences in performance were discussed with…

College students learned artificial grammar under two conditions: paired associate learning (PA), and observation of exemplars (OBS). OBS induced abstract representation of the rules of grammar. PA produced very different learning--subjects knew some whole items but detected little structure. Grammar was learned largely by analogy rather than…

Measures of abstract reasoning ability, degree of bidialectism, and reading performance were administered to Black, inner-city third and fifth graders. Abstract reasoning ability significantly affected reading performance while expressive proficiency in Standard English and Black English did not significantly affect scores. The importance of…

Examines conditions for the acquisition of the proportionality concept and attempts to improve the ability of remedial college students in an urban university to solve proportions. Specifically, the study was designed: (1) to observe the acquisition of the proportionality concept through training on the operations of group-structured tasks, and…

Reports on the administration of a biology cognitive preference test to 177 science-oriented high school students. Subjects were asked to rank responses or "extension statements" to items according to their preference. It was found that the high-ability students as a group had a very high preference for questioning and low preference for recall.…

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)