A study examined the ability of subjects of varying ages to write summaries of very familiar material. In particular, it explored the subjects' planning activities both prior to and during the summarization task. The subjects, 15 fifth, 16 seventh, and 15 eleventh grade students and 11 college students, were given two stories to study for a week.…

A study explored the group mapping activity, a process that encourages each reader to construct a visual schema or map following the reading of a story. It also sought to determine if there is a developmental sequence in eighth grade and college students' mapping and if these representations provided new insights into how readers process language.…

Career education for the severely physically disabled in grades kindergarten through 12 is offered by Human Resources Center, Albertson, New York. The center views career education as a broad developmental process and is responsive to the individual's current developmental stage and experiential background. The development process of the severely…

All too often educators establish a "pretest, skill, posttest" type of curriculum. While this approach has an educational value, it must be used within a developmental framework based on individual thinking and learning style. Thus, a thorough knowledge of cognitive development is necessary. A review of the body of knowledge concerning…

A longitudinal study investigated some of the home and school influences on the writing development of 20 children. Data collected in all three phases of the research included measures of preschool oral language development, transcripts and interviews concerning parental and child interest in literacy, classroom observations of primary schooling,…

Retrospective accounts of the nature of adolescence as experienced by mildly handicapped individuals were gathered through indepth conversations and interviews over an 18 month period with 48 mildly retarded adults (ages 22 to 60) living independently in the community. Structured life history interviews were also conducted with parents or other…

Employing a variety of perspectives and methodological techniques, the chapters in this book focus on an area of research concerned with analyzing the organization of and relationship between qualities of social cognition and communicative interaction. The 11 chapters of the book discuss the following topics: (1) the development of children's…

Women who enrolled in college during their middle-aged years (between ages 30 and 49) were studied. Attention was directed to: the relationship between returning to school and critical developmental issues; the influence of educational experience on understanding such issues; and the stress factors experienced by mid-life university women.…

Aptitude treatment interaction (ATI) for the two most widely used science teaching strategies (lecture method and lecture method augmented with classroom activities) was investigated. The aptitude variables examined were cognitive ability level expressed in Piagetian terms and cognitive learning style (field independence/dependence). A sample of…

Three studies of children at two developmental levels were made to assess subjects' understanding of the verbal terms "easy" (to do) and "hard" (to do). Such understanding was studied in the context of statements about personal competence at depicted activities. Behavioral criteria of levels of understanding were employed;…

A psychometric model called Saltus, which represents the qualitative aspects of hierarchical development in a form applicable to additive measurement, was applied. Both Piaget's theory of cognitive development and Gagne's theory of learning hierarchies were used to establish the common features of hierarchical development: (1) gappiness--the…

Two hundred Honolulu-area students from the fourth, fifth, eighth, and ninth grades participated in a study that examined the variables effects of five selected factors (developmental level, sex, reading ability, adult intervention, and variation in film content/form) on the ability of two age groups (nine and ten year old children and thirteen…

The paper presents an overview of Piaget's theory of cognitive development and a review of research in the measurement of formal operations and the impact of the domain of expertise on cognitive functioning. The role of the teacher as described by proponents of Piaget's theory is explored, along with an extensive description of Piaget's stage of…

A case study of the communications of a 79-year-old woman was conducted to test an ecological model of communication. The ecological model is concerned with the conditions to which the aged person adapts by using communication, what that communication entails, and the criteria by which the success of the adaptive communication process may be…

One of a number of reports of a study of the writing development of 14- to 16-year-old students, this booklet is divided into two parts. The first part uses five criteria to analyze what four secondary students learn from composing imaginary stories: (1) What resources are used in the setting or situation? (2) What kind of ordering is used? (3)…