A modification of the Boehm Test of Basic Concepts for use with pre-kindergarten children is presented. Guidelines for administration, age norms and information on reliability and validity are provided. (Author)

Tellegen and Atkinson suggested that the trait of absorption may play a part in meditative skill, creativity, capacity for peak experiences, and empathy. Although the absorption-meditative skill relationship has been confirmed, other predictions have not been tested. Tellegen and Atkinson's Absorption Scale was completed by undergraduates in four…

This study was conducted to identify the cognitive style of students enrolled in a graduate program in library and information science and to examine the relationship between the identified style and other personal variables, such as age, undergraduate major, preference for future institutional affiliation, and preference for future functional…

To understand a text, a reader must engage in three important cognitive activities--recognition, comprehension, and memory. Based on this premise, two experiments were conducted with children to assess individual and developmental differences in speed of word recognition and how these differences related to performance on a variety of memory…

Reported is a study designed to investigate the convergent validity of the cognitive preference construct and to develop new techniques for analyzing cognitive preference data. The cognitive preference construct was invented to help evaluate the science curricula of the sixties based on the assumption that a student's intellectual approach to…

Witkin's concepts of field dependence-independence and restructing are discussed with reference to studies in Russia and in the Netherlands. These concepts are related to differences in style of perception and to success on both cognitive tasks and social tasks. It is suggested that restructing abilities may be trained and restructing ability may…

The special case of the Piagetian model is discussed in relation to test theory. Problems connected with the construction and analysis of a test based on Piaget and Inhelder's The Child's Construction of Quantities are presented, and related to a method of representing the item discrimination which is consonant with Piagetian theory. Loevinger and…

Results are reported of a study to determine the influence of certain demographic variables on an individual's accuracy in cognitive mapping. Cognitive mapping refers to the way in which humans orient themselves in space through the use of imaginary maps of the physical world. Demographic variables measured were income, occupation, marital status,…

Twenty second grade students were tested to determine the possible relationships between concrete operations and reading and between cognitive clarity and reading achievement. The subjects performed six Piagetian conservation tasks and four tasks on cognitive clarity. Reading achievement was based on student records. The data on the relationship…

Factor analyses of the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence (WPPSI) was conducted. The random sample included 100 boys and 100 girls beginning at age four with increments of 6 months up to age 6 1/2. The intercorrelation matrix of the 11 WPPSI subtests at each of the age levels was factor analyzed, and the percent of common,…

An experiment concerning children's conceptions of price was conducted to investigate the influence of the context of a problem on its apprehension. A total of 120 children of several age groups (nursery school, grades 2, 4, and 6) were interviewed individually. An initial question was asked ("Why does a bun cost about one Swedish…

Several studies have shown that the elderly do not perform well on the Piagetian problems of logical thinking; the present set of studies aimed at demonstrating that the elderly maintain the competence to solve such problems. The first study performed by the authors assessed performance of 60 noninstitutionalized middle-class elderly females on…

Two experiments compared the cognitive maps (mental representations of the spatial environment) of first graders, fifth graders and college students, and investigated developmental changes in the ability to manipulate cognitive maps mentally. In the first experiment, subjects were asked to move from stationpoint to stationpoint and at each, to…