Reviews research and theory on the subpopulation of learning disabled children receiving special education services. Reviews developmental concepts as they apply to early intervention for learning disabled children, and theoretical bases for early intervention. Issues of assessment and service delivery are also reviewed. (HTH)

Toddlers in foster care, exposed prenatally to cocaine, were assessed for development, temperament, play behaviors, and adaptive and maladaptive behaviors. Compared to nonexposed toddlers, these toddlers possessed more risk factors at birth and experienced more illnesses after birth; scored lower on conceptual development and higher on expression…

Five charts list toys, playground equipment, and other materials found in most child care settings that promote social, emotional, perceptual, sensory, cognitive, and physical development and that can be used, with little or no modification, by children with disabilities. (MDM)

Describes the Screening and Evaluation Project (SEP), a longitudinal study examining the range of problems in 167 children entering protective custody in Sacramento, California, for reasons of abuse or neglect. Found that 68% of the children were at risk according to one or more of the four standardized assessment instruments that measured…

Critical and creative thinking lessons were designed and presented to 20 biology students in a rural high school. Student attitudes toward critical thinking activities improved significantly after activities involving experimentation, discrepant events, student questioning, ethical dilemmas, and divergent and critical thinking. Includes examples…

Studied changes in prejudice toward blacks and Native Indians among white children between ages six and nine. Found that older children were less prejudiced than younger children. Favorable-white and unfavorable-black evaluations did not decline with age, but unfavorable-white and favorable-black evaluations increased with age, and counter-bias…

Three experiments using university students explored what constitutes an event and what determines its boundaries. Results supported the hypothesis that sequences of stimuli repeating in different contexts are cut out to become cognitive entities ("things" with a beginning and an end) in their own right. Results suggest that the…

Discusses a questionnaire designed to measure parents' perceptions of their child's developmental and academic histories, classroom learning characteristics, and previous foreign language learning. Results suggest parents' perceptions may provide helpful screening information to foreign language teachers. (51 references) (Author/CK)

Pragmatic and semantic problem solving are examined as processes that enhance acquisition of mathematical knowledge. It is suggested that development of mathematical cognition involves restructuring and that math teachers can help restructure children's knowledge systems by providing them with situations in which semantic and pragmatic problem…

Reviews six books on child cognitive and emotional development. The books address the following topics: the assessment of cognitive competence; children's theories of mind; early grammatical development; the psychological consequences of parental belief systems for children; the role of culture in human development; and perspectives from…

Explored the environment for literacy in day-care centers, its relationship with traditional measures of day-care quality, and its influence on children's cognitive and language development. Observations in 30 community-based day-care classrooms revealed relatively impoverished literacy environments. Found that both day-care quality and…

Investigated the effect of using gender as a functional category in elementary school students' gender stereotyping. Results support the idea that the functional use of gender categories leads to increases in gender stereotyping, particularly among those children with less-advanced classification skills. Advanced classification skills proved to…

Developmental assumptions that are frequently regarded as constraints on elementary school science curricula are analyzed. The argument that elementary school children cannot function as experimentalists because they have not yet attained formal operational thought is not supported by the Piagetian or non-Piagetian research reviewed. (SLD)

Conservation and metaphor acquisition were studied in 35 hearing-impaired children (ages 6-19) using either cued speech or oral-aural communication. Significant positive relationships were found between conservation and metaphor in both communication modes, age and metaphor, and age and conservation. Neither conservation nor metaphor was related…

This article describes a problem-solving strategy unit to be used as a supplement to the regular mathematics curriculum at the primary level. Specific teaching steps and examples are given for three developmental stages of thinking: (1) concrete, (2) representational, and (3) abstract. (DB)