In order to study the influence of the information-processing strategy of an adult model on the subsequent strategy of children, 216 grade school children solved modified twenty-questions problems. A repeated-measures factorial design was used with the following variables: (1) information-processing of model (hypothesis scanning, constraint…

The APPROACH (A Procedure for Patterning Responses of Adults and Children) technique was used to code observations of behavior and setting in this ecological study of adult-child cognitive communication patterns. The subjects observed were 32 children who proportionately represented each of four age groups (1 year, 2 years, 3 years, and 4 years)…

This document contains the three papers that comprised the Head Start Research Seminar No. 5 on Intervention in Family Life. The main thrust of this seminar is the investigation of family and parent characteristics that influence the academic performance of young children. Robert Hess, in the opening paper, summarizes the information available on…

In this study, representational thought, which involves the child's ability to function in terms of nonpresent reality, is viewed within a cognitive-developmental framework. To see if disadvantaged children would function in the same way as advantaged children on tasks which required representational thought rather than verbalization, children…

In order to investigate diffusion effects within families involved in an intervention program, 80 disadvantaged children were divided into four groups, three of which were made up of younger siblings of preschool children in the intervention program. In two of these three groups, the mother was also involved in the program. The fourth group was…

After opening with a 13-page review of the literature, the document's main emphasis is on the three experiments included in this report. The specific rationale, procedures, and results of the three studies comprise the major portion of the document. The general purpose of Experiment 1 was to ascertain the effects of prior relevant subject matter…

This ecological study is one part of a broad research effort to understand the backgrounds and characteristics of culturally disadvantaged children. The study attempted to provide empirical data which could be used to describe differences in home environments and behavior of three young children from deprived and non-deprived homes. Focus was on…

Expanded abstracts and critical analyses are given for each of 14 research articles. Studies on instructional strategies or methods are reported in five reviews; three report studies concerned with concept attainment; three review studies in measurement of cognitive abilities; one study is on the effect of a laboratory for college freshman math…

In this book Piaget considers the way children learn about the world. He addresses such questions as the following: How does a child learn to perceive the world around him? How, for example, does he learn that by grasping an object, he can pull it towards him, or that a ball of clay, flattened, is no smaller than it was before? How does he learn…

Reported is one of a series of investigations of the Project on an Information Memory Model. This study was done to test an information memory model for identifying the unit of information structure involved in task cognitions by humans. Four groups of 30 randomly selected subjects (ages 7, 9, 11 and 15 years) performed a sorting task of 14…

This study investigates relationships between differences in students' achievement and differences obtained by a technique held to yield a reasonably valid representation of students' memory structures of a particular subject matter. Also investigated was the nature of the flow of information between curriculum materials, teachers, and students.…

This study investigated middle school children's ability to form a mental image of a planar figure and to: (1) mentally flip, turn, or slide this representation and then construct the resultant image in correct position ("performing individual motions"), (2) perform two such motions in succession ("composition of motions"), (3) perform the process…

The main purpose of this study was to determine the relative effectiveness of the planetarium in attaining the perceived goals of planetarium educators. The goal areas for the 986 second-grade children involved in the study were low level Cognitive or Knowledge, Comprehension, and Application; Affective or Receiving, Responding, and Valuing; and…

This paper focuses on the importance of play for a child's physical, emotional, cognitive, and social development. Three major purposes of the report are: (1) to persuade those concerned with the education of young children that play is an essential activity for children's well-being and should be facilitated at home and in the classroom, (2) to…

The linguistic relativity hypothesis is the view that the language a person speaks influences his perception of the world. This hypothesis is frequently misunderstood to be a question of the influence of language on culture, when in reality it emphasizes the influence of language on the cognition of its speakers. This distinction between culture…