The concept of equivalence is shown to be an elusive one that provides difficulty for preschoolers through college students. The idea persists that the equal sign is a "do something," or operator symbol, rather than a symbol for an equivalence relation. (MP)

Seven-year-olds and university students were questioned about hidden or visible colored counters. Under certain testing conditions, the children were able to demonstrate one of the major characteristics of formal operational thought, namely the ability to reason in terms of verbally stated hypotheses without reliance on direct, physical…

The paper reviews contributions of J. Piaget and others to the understanding of perception's importance in the cognitive development of mentally retarded children. The effects of poor discrimination learning on IQ scores are noted. (CL)

Questionnaires were administered to 214 Mexican American adolescents to determine their attitudes toward television commercial truthfulness and to examine those attitudes in concert with developmental levels of reasoning among high school students. Fifteen references are listed. (FM)

Class inclusion problems differing in size of the array and in superordinate class were given to 84 boys and girls in grades 1 through 4 in a first experiment, and 41 boys and girls in grades 3 and 4 in a second experiment. The experiments sought to determine performance variables explaining the developmentally late appearance of class-inclusion…

Results suggest that children can use the rules of conversational sequencing to evaluate the need for an inference to the speaker's intent when speakers deliberately violate a rule. This ability is acquired by six or seven years of age, but children do not correctly infer the speaker's intent until they are eight or nine years old. (Author/RH)

Forms and functions of social comparison verbalizations were studied among preschoolers in a naturalistic setting. Each social comparison statement was coded into content (ability, possession, status, attitude, activity) and function (diffentiation/similarity, cognitive clarity, evaluative, competitive) categories. Results indicated preschoolers…

Descries professional overspecialization and education's overemphasis on the acquisition of formalized information. Discusses the capabilities of the hemispheres of the brain and the problems caused by focusing on only the left hemisphere. Illustrates intuition and abstract patterns. Suggests that recognition of laterality will advance education…

To determine the effects of a teacher's level of questioning on the development of children's problem-solving ability, children were exposed to three five-week treatment conditions in a half-day laboratory nursery school program. High-level cognitive questioning seemed to result in children's ability to generate significantly more alternative…

Describes group training model that differs from the traditional T-group model in structure, leadership, and assumptions about learning. The life-cycle model is based on situational leadership, differential structures based on group maturity, and integration of conceptual and experiential learning. (Author)

Second-, third-, and sixth-grade children (N=48) were presented sets of categorically-related pictures, were either prompted or not prompted to identify categories and later asked to recall categories. Recall time for second- and third-grade prompted children was significantly less than for nonprompted peers. No differences were found with sixth…

Results indicated that progress through adolescence leads to greater differentiation, abstraction, and integration. The emergence of the ability to abstract was considered the most important cognitive development in the adolescent's self-system. Major transformations appeared after age 15. (Author/DB)

Results support the hypothesis that certain classification skills underlie two types of role-taking ability: (1) in which children were asked how another child would think a cartoon ended if shown only the beginning; and (2) in which children were asked how another child would think a cartoon began if shown only the end. (Author/DB)

Studies relating time (in four ranges--years, days, hours, and minutes) to educational outcomes are reviewed. The need to include time as one factor in a theory of educational productivity is discussed. (Author/JD)