For a specialist from the communication discipline, studying with Alexander Luria, who had been a colleague of Lev Vygotsky in the l920's, provided insights into the Soviet psychologist's ideas about mediation and mind and how writing fits into those ideas. According to Luria, Vygotsky was a methodologist who worried about what kinds of methods…

An initial description of the links between cognitive input, discourse rules, and the rules of sentence grammar is made, based on a technique developed for observing the translation of cognitive input into language in a spontaneous, practical speech event: descriptions of the lay-outs of apartments. (Author/RM)

Advocates (1) breaking the lock-step sequencing of courses which places physics at the end of a three-year sequence, (2) adjusting grading procedures to bring them in line with other school courses, and (3) translating abstract concepts into concrete analogies in order to increase physics enrollment. (CP)

This paper describes the methods and techniques called Conceptual Analysis (CA), a rigorous procedure to generate (without involuntary omissions and repetitions) knowledge bases for the development of knowledge-based systems. An introduction is given of CA and how it can be used to produce knowledge bases. A discussion is presented on what is…

Discussed are research methods used to measure developmental changes in children's reasoning about ability. While adults generally differentiate ability, effort, luck, and task difficulty as causes for success and failure, children progressively think that effort or outcome is ability (level 1), that effort is the cause of performance outcomes…

Three studies examined the domain of concepts about dinosaurs in order to assess how the domain might be structured in 4- through 7-year-old children's representations and to explore how the knowledge might be used. Findings indicated that significant differences exist in the way expert and novice children's representations are structured.…

A multidimensional model of the growth of moral reasoning is described that is significantly different from those proposed by Kohlberg and Piaget. A study that tests several aspects of the model on university students is reported. The suggestion that well-developed chains of reasons are a prerequisite for the emergence of metaethical reasoning was…

This paper contains an elementary and short proof for the case that the underlying distribution function F is discrete, and then extends the result to the general F. In other proofs underlying iid sequences of random variables with continuous distributions are considered to be the "ideal" case. In this paper discretization of the underlying iid…

Literature on cognition is surveyed with a special emphasis on the development of academic skills in handicapped children. (Author/KM)

Tested 63 kindergarten children on a spatial perspective task in which they copied the location and orientation of objects when the model and response spaces were aligned or when one was rotated 90 degrees or 180 degrees. (LLK)

Examines the concepts employed by normal and retarded children matched for mental age in kindergarten through fourth grades. Two studies explored the schema by which these children organized their experience into meaningful patterns. (LLK)