The measurement of a pupil's comprehension development from literal comprehension to evaluation focused on two questions: (1) How do we measure the various types of comprehension? and (2) How should we measure the various types of comprehension? Literal comprehension is presently measured by the recall or memory-type question. However, one should…

A Piagetian type task, The Island Puzzle, was administered to children grades 5 to 12, to science teachers attending a National Science Teachers Association Convention, and to college physics teachers attending a regional meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers. The procedures differed from those of Piaget in that the puzzle was…

This paper is a letter to Professor Hans G. Furth discussing his book "Piaget for Teachers" as related to the program of the Campus School at State University College in Plattsburgh, N.Y. The letter is from the three teachers who work with a classroom of 54 youngsters. There are approximately equal numbers of 4-, 5-, 6-, and 7-year olds…

Following a review of research on the effects of early experience upon subsequent cognitive and intellectual development, an alternative Piagetian-based strategy for the study and evaluation of these concerns is presented. Using this paradigm, infants were observed naturalistically for one year. The observations were coded according to the four…

The building block theory of language structure, an information processing approach, is applied to the development of a model of the reading process. Specifically, the model is concerned with the amount of time an individual will spend reading and the amount of content he will decode which is determined by a series of cognitive processes involving…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the Ivanov-Smolensky procedure as an effective clinical device for the assessment of cognitive development in children under four years old. This procedure, expressly developed for assessing development in children with limited verbal skills, minimizes some of the research problems associated with young…

This study sought to determine whether a number of specific counting and numeration behaviors emerge within children in a fixed developmental sequence; at what point in the development of mathematical behavior the use of numerical representations normally appears; and what relationship holds between development of counting skills and development…

This research studied the processes which enable people to acquire semantic information from natural-language discourse. Specific objectives were: (1) to represent semantically the structural meaning of English discourse by a well-defined semantic model; (2) to develop a way of using the semantic representation of a text as a structural model for…

CLASSROOM OBSERVATIONS OF 38 HEADSTART TEACHERS, TAKEN ON FOUR OCCASIONS BY FOUR DIFFERENT OBSERVERS, WERE SCORED FOR SUCH CONTENT CHARACTERISTICS AS (1) AMOUNT AND KIND OF COMMUNICATION WITH THE CHILDREN, (2) STRESS ON OBEDIENCE OR INTELLECTUAL VALUES, AND (3) PHYSICAL-MOTOR SKILLS. THESE SCORES WERE COMPARED WITH THE CHILDREN'S INTELLECTUAL…

Reported is a study of 1555 students, grades 4-12, regarding understanding the concept of controlling variables. Subjects were examined on a task involving spheres rolling down an incline and striking a target sphere; they were evaluated upon their explanations of answers, not their choice of answers. Findings indicated that the Piagetian stage of…

A model for sequencing intellectual skills through the use of learning hierarchies is provided. Applications of this model to social studies education are included. (DE)

Describes children's reactions to chance and probability in a variety of experimental situations, using four different experiments from Piaget's work, to give a clearer picture of how children approach these ideas. (GA)

It was found, as expected, that the number of subjects giving conservation responses did not reach 50 percent until age 12. Schooling did not seem to be a major factor in accelerating the attainment of concrete operations. Social class and urbanization had an effect on several tasks. (Author/AM)

Examines children's ability to make both logical and pragmatic presuppositional inferences and to discriminate between the two as a function of contextual information. Five- and eight-year-old children served as subjects. (BD)

Teaching active comprehension helps students learn to ask their own questions and guide their own thinking. (MKM)