To investigate the development of symbolic play, 18 Japanese normal boys and girls were individually tested once every even-numbered month from when they were 12 to 24 months of age. Symbolic play was generally defined as behavior which represents actual or imagined experience by using objects, gesture or language alone or in combination. The…

The factors underlying memory performance in learning are shown to be affected by strategic processing and by automatic processing. Strategic processing is under the conscious control and effort of the learner while automatic processing is dependent on the strength of associations between new concepts and known concepts in a given domain.…

The document contains abstracts and major findings of research conducted by the University of Kansas Institute for Research in Learning Disabilities on the learning disabled (LD) adolescent and young adult in both school and nonschool settings. Major findings are presented in three sections--cognitive/academic characteristics and setting demands,…

Studies using human figure drawing as a measurement technique are reviewed as part of an inquiry concerning the effectiveness of instruction to improve children's body image. It is concluded that the findings reviewed are inconclusive as to whether instruction can improve children's perceptions and knowledge of body image, and that further…

The second of eight related documents, this booklet is part of a series of papers presented at the 1978 National Right to Read Conference examining issues and problems in literacy. In its examination of the place of reading in the preschool curriculum, the booklet first explores different definitions of reading and develops a concept of the…

Age and cognitive developmental level were used as independent variables in order to assess their relative effects on the number and kinds of self-referent constructs used by children and adolescents. Fifty-four 8-year-olds, sixty-four 12-year-olds, and forty-six 16-year-olds were recruited from their respective third, seventh, and eleventh grades…

This is the second volume in a series that records the official Symposium Proceedings of the Jean Piaget Society and examines the theoretical, empirical, and applied aspects of Jean Piaget's seminal epistemology. The 12 papers are divided into four areas: language development, formal reasoning, social cognition, and applied research. The topics of…

A study proposing reality and fantasy discrimination of television content as a classificatory ability sought to identify differences between subjects who were able to make sophisticated reality-fantasy judgements and those who were not, and factors which might contribute to a subject's sophistication in discrimination. Open-ended and structured…

The paper describes an experiment in which 52 deaf children (7-19 years old) and 36 normal hearing children (7-16 years old) were given several Piagetian conservation tasks to determine if the conventional instructions are the basis for conservation failure in deaf children and to examine the order in which deaf Ss acquired various forms of…

The question of how Piaget selects mathematical concepts for his theory is addressed as a problem which may have contributed to a misinterpretation of the relevance of conservation studies for mathematics education. A new form of pseudo-conservation is discussed in which nonconservers of length are able to pick out strips of equal length from an…

Students in grades 5, 8, 11, and college were administered Piagetian tasks dealing with horizontals and verticals. The tasks were the bottle task, the pendulum task, and the faucet task. The results disagreed with Piaget's suggested timetable. Since the horizontal task results did not yield a majority of correct predictions for any of the groups,…

This review of the current state of research on how children make sense of television and its content examines age-related differences in children's interpretations of television entertainment content in general, and advertising content in particular. A brief analysis and description of the fundamental principles of cognitive development theory…

This study examined the nature of sex-related differences in spatial ability. Results indicated that sex-related cognitive differences are concentrated among subjects having poor spatial ability. Suggestions for remedial education of females and males are given. (MK)