Recognition errors of children in Grades 2, 4, and 6 were examined. Subjects learned words under intentional or incidental instructions and were tested immediately or 48 hours later. Subjects had to choose a target word from among acoustic, conceptual, associative and neutral distractors. The immediate recognition of 2nd-grade subjects was…

To determine if training in argumentation could affect the bases for student evaluation of communication aimed at changing opinions, students from Michigan State University formed an experimental group (those in an argumentation course) and a control group (those in a business letter writing course). The treatments consisted of four varying…

A review of literature drawn from logic, epistemology, learning theory, clinical psychology, childhood development, factor analyses of cognition, and the descriptive literature of scientific method was used to develop definitions of "abstract concept,""abstraction," and related terms. Criteria for categorizing abstract concepts according to their…

The article describes research which attempted to discover whether emotionally disturbed children functioned at Piagetian levels of abstract thought similar to normal children. (CD)

Describes various movement activities through which young children may discover topological relationships which provide a foundation for their growing understanding of space. (CM)

Jean Piaget's theory of genetic epistemology is criticized from a philosophical point of view. (JD)

Discusses problems in finding a place for logic in a model of reasoning and develops a conception of an overall model, one of whose components is strictly logical in nature. A new view of the logical function of "if-then" is proposed, then the logic is developed, and its relation to standard propositional logic is established. Also discusses…

Explores the hypothesis that there is a decline in operational thought ability in the elderly. Two samples of elderly males, with mean ages of 71.80 and 74.29 years respectively, were tested for their ability to conserve mass, surface areas and volume. (BD)

A sample of 144 children from nursery school, first, and third grades were given a series of problems in which they were required to judge which of 2 synchronous events was longer in duration and to rationalize their judgments. (Author/JMB)

Four studies examined the cognitive bases of children's judgments of morality. Over 240 children from preschool to fourth grade were participants. Moral dilemmas consisting of information about a character's motives and the consequences of his actions were devised in such a way that the order, concreteness and imageability of information were…

Used single-subject analyses to examine the developmental difficulty of the ulterior motive question (the backward inverse inference) in five- and seven-year-olds. Results suggest that children's difficulties with ulterior motive information result both from the abstract nature and the logical form of the task. (Author/SKC)

Proposes that technical writing teachers have a special responsibility to use their subject matter to advance the critical reasoning processes required in the composing process, the disciplines, and the professions. Suggests 10 critical thinking skills to encourage in technical writing courses. (MS)

A study of 240 students in grades 4-10 found that fourth graders performed well on a proverb comprehension task involving contextual information, refuting earlier findings that preadolescents interpret proverbs literally. Performance was found to improve steadily through grade eight and was correlated to performance on a perceptual analogical…

This study examined whether familiarity with content influences performance on conditional reasoning problems of the form P implies Q independently of ease of generation of specific examples of "Q and not-P." Results indicated that increased content familiarity resulted in higher performance levels. (Author/JAZ)

Major themes from the previous light articles on literacy, reasoning, and education are highlighted. Common inferences about the needs for organizational change, loosening of governmental rules and controls, and field-initiated research are described. The general exclusion of the affective domain from this discussions of higher order reasoning is…