Described is an exercise that will help college-level psychology students learn abstract and relational thinking skills. The exercise will provide students with a new way to handle compare-and-contrast questions. (RM)

Following a brief discussion of two facets of written material readability--reading ease and human interest--two reasons why written instructional material may be so difficult to read are considered: use of technical vocabulary and abstract language. Suggestions to make written instructional materials more readable are provided. (MBR)

Presents a developmental approach to teaching programing at all educational levels which stresses concepts rather than syntax; provides motivation, relevant examples, and activities; proceeds from concrete to pictorial to abstract according to age and experience of learners; and utilizes increasingly complex activities building upon and extending…

Three experiments assessed 252 preschoolers' understanding of attributes and dimensions. A conceptual measure and a linguistic measure were employed. Results indicated that the acquisition of some attribute and dimension labels appears to follow closely the trend in conceptual development. (Author/CI)

Describes computer simulations that combine abstract and conceptual learning to help create an intense, content-rich learning opportunity grounded in experience and reality. Examines learning with intent, limitations of computers, features of a good simulation, and linking contextual and abstract learning. (CT)

Examines ways in which the varying degrees of distance that occur in drama may help children to engage in more abstract levels of thought and language. (HTH)

Giambattista Vico, an 18th-century Neapolitan philosopher, believed that, from children, adults could learn lessons they could not teach themselves. This learning, however, is predicated on the necessity that genuine childhood be allowed to exist and that logic and abstraction are not introduced to children too soon. (JMK)

This paper discusses what the theory of abstraction is about, the need for a theory of abstraction in mathematics education, and the requirements that such a theory should meet. All three are reconsidered from a personal point of view. (KHR)

In this paper we report on a research aimed to identify and characterize secondary school students' reasoning and proof abilities when working with 3-dimensional geometric solids. We analyze students' answers to two problems asking them to prove certain properties of prisms. As results of this analysis, we get, on the one side, a characterization…

This paper presents a developmental model of students' acquisition of competence in quantitative and algebraic problem solving. A key notion underlying the developmental model is a distinction between grounded and abstract representations. Grounded representations, like story problems, are more concrete and familiar, closer to physical objects and…

This paper presents a cognitive theoretical framework for the learning of mathematics which has generic implications for other disciplines. The framework has been developed using a combination of established theories about learning and the authors' research into the understanding of some specific types of learning. It is based on the integration…

Informal interviews and naturalistic observations indicate that the child often invents novel ways of doing arithmetic and that some type of individualized instruction is necessary. (Author/WM)

Punisher effectiveness and generalization of an aversive stimulus, a rationale, and a combination of the two were investigated in a laboratory analog designed for punishment research, with 80 first and second grade subjects. Significantly greater suppression of deviant behavior and punishment generalization occurred when the punisher consisted of…

Article considers the forms of poetry and painting found in the talents of artists, such as Pound and Kandinsky. (RK)

Reprinted from the November 1971 issue of the Journal of Thought.'' (DD)