The study examines the writing of college freshmen on expository, argumentative, and speculative tasks by means of the Crediton cognitive model in order to describe how and why they evoke the range of responses they do, and why particular cognitive strategies are drawn on. Conclusions are presented and discussed. (Author/CT)

Investigated the different levels of response 60 primary children had to literature in the classroom and examined the differences in terms of stages in cognitive development. (DF)

Preschool, third-grade and sixth-grade children, and adults were shown vignettes depicting eight types of experiences and asked for their own (for children) or the children's (for adults) expected emotional reactions. Overall, adults showed an absence of developmental considerations in their implicit theories of children's emotional…

A synopsis of research on language, cognition, and communication in deaf students and adults explores basic linguistic processes, evaluates present understanding of sign language as a language, and relates language to ethnicity and biculturalism, concluding that American Sign Language should be the preferred language of instruction. (Author/CL)

Tested infants in their second year with a box task to determine whether they would show a hand preference in solutions involving complete differentiation of roles for the two hands. (HOD)

Examines development of event memory by determining how personally experienced events with two types of structure were reported by kindergartners and adults. Events in making and playing with clay were organized causally and temporally. Results show that adults and children used a goal-based hierarchical structure to remember events, although use…

Second and third graders and fifth and sixth graders were tested in a very large, unfamiliar environment to determine the relation of their knowledge of an abstract reference frame to performance on a spatial inference task. (HOD)

Describes three experiments that examined how children (4- to 11-year-olds) use their knowledge of the attributes of living things to infer whether particular objects are alive. (HOD)

Examines children's understanding of what variables and relations are important in problem structures, and their use of these variables and relations in problem solving. (HOD)

Investigates a proposed four-stage developmental sequence that describes how children explain changes in sad and angry feelings and how their ability to understand is related to their theories of how feelings change. (HOD)

The validation of the developmental Mokken scale for seriation was discussed. It was shown that the observed scale was invariant for different samples from previous research. Stepwise multiple regression analysis revealed that a selection of two seriation tasks on the scale accounted for 76.4 percent of the explained variance. (Author/DWH)

Line drawings depicting expressive qualities that were created by subjects aged from 4 to 20 were examined to trace the development of expressivity. Results document a developmental trend from initial ability to produce abstract expression toward production of more complex multidimensional types of expression and increasing integration of…

Compares the manipulative exploration of objects of 30 nine-month-old preterm infants with that of 20 nine-month-old full-term infants. Although no difference between the preterms and the full terms was noted, a high-risk preterm subgroup manipulated objects less. A relationship was found between manipulative exploration at nine months and later…

Reviews studies of face-recognition memory and considers implications for assessing the dependability of children's performances as eyewitnesses. Considers personal factors (age, intellectual differences, and gender) and situational factors (familiarity of face, retention interval, and others). Also identifies developmental questions for future…

The Parents as First Teachers project successfully teaches Missouri parents to enhance their children's cognitive development. The project recruited 300 first-time parents in its first year, then provided them with educational support and guidance during their children's first three years, while monitoring the children's progress. (PGD)