The literature suggests a "concrete" to "abstract" hierarchy in concept acquisition. However, typical tests do not reflect this hierarchy. Studies have been reported in which an "abstract" option for an item was included in with a "concrete" option and with distractors. This procedure assumes that "abstract" and "concrete" behavior is on a common…

A relationship is established in this paper between three increasingly broad curriculum matters: Kohlberg's moral development concept; Sample's and Ornstein's theory of cerebral hemispheresity; and legislator-mandated competency testing. The interplay which must develop between the findings in the fields of cognitive psychology and neuropsychology…

Piaget has hypothesized that concrete and formal operations can be described by specific logical models. The present study focused on assessing various aspects of four concrete operational groupings and two variations of two formal operational characteristics. Six hundred twenty-two 9-14 year old students participating in the Human Sciences…

An effort is made at defining the lessons of the sixties as they relate to the understanding of processes of social and organizational change. This essay examines the theory of change that emerged in the sixties, describes how the current condition in the United States indicates the wrongness of this view, and suggests a reformulation based on a…

Students who are taught to understand and apply Korzybski's uses of semantics to their writing will learn to write more concretely. As students locate words and descriptions vertically on Korzybski's scale of abstraction levels, they will become able to perceive how meanings change when descriptions become either more general or specific, to…

Twenty-three German-English bilingual boys and girls, ranging from grades three to six in Saskatchewan's schools, were used in this study which sought to investigate their reading behavior when reading English passages. The Individual Reading Inventory, administered in both languages, indicated that comprehension after oral and silent reading in…

This is the first of the NCTM yearbooks to be written by a single author. He traces the history of the terms "variable" and "function" and discusses the meaning of functionality. The logical and psychological bases are examined followed by a general discussion of the psychology of reasoning. Two chapters outline the history of…

When subjects are given open-ended stimulus situations allowing for responses at all possible stages of a developmental theory, the stage scores of individuals for each situation can be treated as scores on polychotomous items. Extensions of the concepts of difficulty and discriminating power from the dichotomous case to this ordinal category…

Sixty subjects participated in an experiment involving estimation of difficulty of items in a test of reasoning ability. The estimates were to be given both according to conventional conditions of magnitude estimations with a preassigned comparison standard and according to a modified procedure of magnitude estimation where the comparison standard…

Compared was the performance of nine educable mentally retarded (EMR) children (mean age 9 years) with the performance of 50 normal kindergarten children on a test of visual perception at the abstract level. The test of 17 items involved the dimensions of size, shape, and color at four steps of skill attainment (recognition, discrimination,…

This study investigated developmental changes in semantic structure, focusing on whether changes could account for differences in the concepts acquired by children and those acquired by adults. Semantic structure was determined at each of four age levels (6, 9, 12 years and college students). Two indications of developmental change were observed…

Previous research on analogy solutions indicated that an associative relatedness process was central to the solution process. One implication of these findings was that differences in associations to the words comprising the items may produce differences in test performance and, hence, account for the vast differentials in performance of persons…

Seven studies were conducted to investigate the interactions between imagery-ability and experimental treatments that parallel instructional procedures. The general orientation of the studies was to extend the concepts of imaginal and verbal coding systems to include individual differences in symbolic habits. Thus all the studies took into account…

Language as an identifiable cognitive behavior must be studied in relation to identity and memory, all of whose structures undergo progressive changes as the child develops. The organization of the development of the organism depends upon relatively ordered structures of growth, following foreseeable pathways or creodes. The processes occurring…

A study was conducted to test the hypothesis that Ss from disadvantaged homes have poorly developed "abstract" thinking skills and that their thought can be characterized as more "concrete" or relational. Four forms of a problem-solving inventory were developed which differed in mode of presentation. The original form consisted of real-life…