It is important for early childhood professionals to learn about childhood fears so that they can help children cope with them. Children's fears are normal, the nature of preschoolers' fears is related to their cognitive development, and a child's temperament and sense of autonomy may influence the extent of and manner of reaction to a fearful…

Examines preschool children's ability for advance planning and mishap prevention or remediation related to familiar events. Indicates that children three to five years old appear to use general event knowledge in constructing verbal plans. However, developmental differences in the quality of plans suggests that the ability of using general…

Two studies examined 19 preschoolers' ability to distinguish between pretense and reality, testing whether emotionally charged events can cause children to lend probability to pretense. Subjects were assigned to various conditions including termination or no termination of pretense and emotionally colored pretense play scenarios. Found that, even…

This study compared the regulation of cognitive activity in 30 children (ages 15 to 95 months) with autism or mental retardation matched for global, verbal, and nonverbal developmental ages. Testing on tasks of object permanence indicated that the autistic children had a pervasive difficulty in maintenance set, made more perseverative errors, and…

Presented a categorization of types of science education research, their possible contributions to cognitive science, and the potential of results from cognitive science for enriching the science education research accounts. Explored the relationship of an example of cognitive work to cognitive science. (15 references) (Author/JRH)

A group of 16 infants (ages 6 to 24 months) with Down's Syndrome (DS) were exposed to two operant learning tasks varying in control of reinforcement. Comparison with chronological and developmental age matched controls found DS subjects characterized by increasing adoption of counterproductive learning behaviors with increasing age. (Author/DB)

Student understanding of 30 nontechnical words used in science was investigated. No significant differences were found between the understanding of nontechnical words in science or between the verbal reasoning ability of males (n=108) and females (n=89). Of the four different question formats, students had the most difficulty with the synonym…

Concepts used by two classes of grade eight students, one advanced and the other average, to explain the changes that occur when water is heated to boiling are presented. Little difference was found between groups in terms of the personal misconceptions used to explain boiling. The changes that take place in conceptual knowledge immediately after…

Combined free response questionnaire and interview procedure are used to probe students' ideas regarding how they believe they see both luminous and nonluminous objects and how they think they hear source of sound. From large sample of students studied (n=1901), prevalence of ideas in different age groups is compared, and progression can be seen.…

Examined children's emotional and cognitive responses to emotionally evocative vignettes. Results indicated age-related increases in children's responses. Found limited increases with age in children's concordant emotions, or emotions identical to emotions of persons in the vignettes, and continuous increases with age in children's attributions…

Discusses ideas outlined in a recent report from the Council on Physical Education for Children on the importance of a success-orientated physical education (PE) program for elementary school students. Emphasizes the importance of (1) instructionally appropriate PE; (2) motor skill and movement concept development; (3) social and emotional…

Presents a checklist of core behaviors for use in assessing students' strengths, weaknesses, and changes in thinking skills. Lists persistence, decreased impulsivity, flexibility, metacognition, checking for accuracy, problem posing, drawing on past knowledge and experience, transfer of skills to new situations, precision of language, and…

Summarizes researchers' beliefs about cognitive development. Topics include (1) the child as constructive thinker; (2) new research methods; (3) the characterization of children's cognitive development; (4) estimates of children's competence; (5) stages of development; (6) interrelations among developmental skills; (7) mechanisms of development;…

Seventeen preschool children, 26 kindergarten, and 26 fourth grade childrens' knowledge structures were examined with a word association task and a match-to-sample picture task to determine whether or not children used slot-filler categories as a mediating structure between event-based and taxonomic knowledge structures as proposed by Nelson…

Four experiments determined that kindergartners' and second graders' inductions are sensitive to the similarity between premise and conclusion categories. Second graders' inductions are sensitive to the similarity of a premise category to a higher order category that includes the premise and conclusion categories. (BC)