Part of the monthly Saturday Review supplement, "Education in America," sponsored by the Charles F. Kettering Foundation.

Paper presented at the conference on "Curriculum Development in a Changing World, Syracuse University, July 10-11, 1968.

Describing the middle school as extending from the fifth or sixth through the eighth grades, this review describes current middle school philosophies and characteristics and cites middle school research and implications. Ideally, the report maintains, the middle school is designed to serve the needs of early adolescents through such techniques as…

Forty-four second grade students participated in a study examining the relationships between field dependence/independence (FDI), grammatical awareness, reading ability, and training in grammatical awareness. After the children were pretested for their levels of cognitive development, degree of field independence, grammatical awareness, and…

Among the characteristics of communicative apprehensive individuals are fearful reactions to communication situations, perceptions of low personal competency, an inability to identify appropriate social behaviors, and an anticipation of negative outcomes to interaction. One proposed model for communication apprehension assumes that a state of…

Cognitive performance on "An Inventory of Piaget's Developmental Tasks" (IPDT) was related to the Scholastic Aptitude Tests and performance in both college chemistry lecture and laboratory classes. The IPDT is a valid and reliable 72-item, untimed, multiple-choice paper and pencil inventory with 19 subscales representing different…

The proposal outlines a study to assess the role of computers in assessing and instructing students with severe cerebral palsy in spatial and communication skills. The computer's capacity to make learning interesting and challenging to the severely disabled student is noted, along with its use as a diagnostic tool. Implications for theories on…

Recent research on human memory and cognition with particular emphasis on research that might have some promise for mathematics education is reviewed. The focus is on techniques for analyzing the mind in two areas: (1) the architecture of the human memory system, using the information processing model; and (2) the content and structure of…

Freshman composition students have difficulties in moving to new stages of cognitive ability similar to the difficulties experienced by poorer writers in moving to new levels of syntactic maturity. A model of moral/cognitive development created by Lawrence Kohlberg indicates that human responses to moral choices move through as many as six stages…

Cognitive development as it progresses from concrete to abstract thinking is discussed as it relates to adolescent youth and the early secondary curriculum. Piagetian tests administered to a group of freshman and sophomore high school students revealed that many had difficulty with those scholastic activities requiring formal reasoning. Three…

The influence of age, sex, representational detail of objects (prototypicality) and adult play suggestions on children's progression of pretend behaviors was studied. A checklist was developed and utilized for coding the responses of 20 children (10 males, 10 females), to objects judged to be high and low prototypical by 12 adults. Children ranged…