All instruction, including social studies, should be concerned with developing both halves of the brain rather than continuing to place emphasis only on those functions which reside in the left cerebral hemisphere. When presented with a social studies problem, students can view it in two ways--logically and intuitively. (RM)

A curriculum theory begins in the transference of meaning from the familiar and the comprehensible to the abstract and perplexing problems arising from the actual teaching situation. These metaphors that evolve into theories serve to direct research by creating a symbolic language. (JN)

Cohen's (TM 504 890) formal rules of intuitive probability lack normative or descriptive appeal, and his interpretation of the author's findings is not compelling. (CP)

This paper examines the nature of concepts and conceptual processes and the manner of their formation. It argues that a process of successive abstraction and systematization is central to the evolution of conceptual structures. Classificatory processes are discussed and three levels of abstraction outlined. (Author/SJL)

Relationships between death concepts of Black and White children and their racial status were examined. Lower-middle-class elementary children completed a four-item questionnaire on death. Most children defined death as the end of living and listed physical causes as the explanation of death. In general, children's death concepts were similar.…

There is a growing realization that the premises of materialism are applicable within certain limits only. The mystical writings of Blake teach that man's body is a mental body, and his universe a mental universe. (JN)

The effectiveness of strategy training programs that differed in the degree of subject self management required on the verbal abstraction performance of 80 educable mentally retarded children and adolescents was compared. In terms of acquisition, all three training conditions, irrespective of the degree of self management required, were superior…

This operational theory of adult learning is based on the premise that learning is a problem-solving process involving attention, differentiation, structuring, integration, abstracting, and generalization. (Journal availability: Department of Adult Education, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS 66506.) (SK)

An article by Harvey Siegal, "Kuhn and Critical Thought," is criticized. (JD)

Used a pretest/post-test control group design involving 44 female adolescent subjects to determine whether Moral Stage 3 subjects who have attained early basic formal operations are more susceptible to attempts to stimulate moral development than Stage 3 subjects who have attained only beginning formal operations and lack the cognitive…

Twenty-two preschoolers aged 48-63 months were observed and questioned by a familiar experimenter about their spontaneous helping, sharing, or comforting behavior over a 12-week period. (JMB)

College students instructed to "fake good" on a test of moral reasoning were unable to do so, but they could lower their scores significantly when directed to. (Editor)

Discussion of image database systems focuses on semantic queries and shows how an image is abstracted into a hierarchy of entity names and features; how relations are established between entities visible in the image; and how a "fuzzy" matching technique is used to compare semantic queries to image abstractions. (Author/LRW)

A model of conditional reasoning predicted that children under 12 would respond correctly to questions of uncertain logical form if premises and context enabled them to access counterexamples from memory, and that children's performance with uncertain logical forms would decrease when empirically true premises are presented in a fantasy context.…

Proposes a variant of mental model theory which suggests that the development of conditional reasoning (if--then) can be explained by such factors as the capacity of working memory, range of knowledge available to a reasoner, and his/her ability to access this knowledge "on-line." Finds much empirical data explained by this model.…