Available from: British Medical Journal, 1172 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02134. In order to determine whether Central Nervous System irradiation effects intellectual abilities, 28 children in remission at least 2 years after completing chemotherapy for acute lymphoblastic leukemia were assessed on standardized psychological tests…

Describes steps involved in the construction of a 15-item test to measure formal reasoning in junior and senior high school students. From analysis, the author concludes that the test has face, convergent, and factorial validities. (CP)

A pretest-posttest research design was used with 104 first-grade children to determine if discrimination and classifactory activities would affect transition from preoperational to concrete stages. Findings showed the experimental group exhibited significantly greater transition than did the control group. (CP)

The relationship between a cognitive style variable, field-dependence-independence, and instructional treatments that differed in two dimensions of discovery learning, level of guidance and level of abstraction, was investigated with 116 prospective elementary teachers. As predicted, field-independent students did better with minimum guidance,…

This is the third in a sequence of three papers describing an investigation of fifth graders' ability to learn to distinguish between valid and fallacious inferences from simple conditional premises. This paper presents the research design and results. (MN)

Explains how teachers can initiate mapping experiences with young children by providing motor experiences inside and outside the classroom. Experiences should be followed by work with three-dimensional models, then with two-dimensional paper, and finally with lines. (Author)

Presents a developmental study of children's understanding and appreciation of figurative language. Results replicated previous findings that kindergarten children are capable of interpreting figurative language whereas appreciation appears to require increased cognitive sophistication. (JMB)

The development of children's comprehension of cause and effect relationships was studied in 68 kindergarten, first grade, and second grade children. (BRT)

Data from three studies with elementary and junior high school students are presented in support of the contention that facility in concrete operations is necessary and sufficient for competence in the simple syllogistic forms, while formal operations are required when dealing with conditional statements in certain more complex contexts.…

Two studies with first- and fifth-grade children in two learning tasks showed that preoperational children did not necessarily learn responses followed by a stimulus object previously instrumental in obtaining a reward, while postoperational subjects did. (Author/JMB)

This essay affirms that people are not, like insects, genetically compelled to live and work collectively. Above all, language separates us from the rest of the animal world, allowing us to depart from reflex activity to consider the ambiguous and unknown and formulate new ideas. (Text is in Spanish.) (CHK)

This study was designed to test the hypothesis that coding used for recall is a dynamic process that changes in accordance with operational structures. Fifty male and female university students participated in two task sessions: (1) Formal operations and recall and (2) recall one month later. Significant correlations supported the basic…

Examines the hypothesis that poor readers will have much greater difficulty in recalling abstract words than will normal readers but will closely approximate normal readers in recalling concrete words. The hypothesis was confirmed at the second-grade level but not at the sixth-grade level. (Author/CB)

Presents a conceptual framework for the development of decision support systems which outlines abstractions involved in the decision-making process and describes various functions and components of the system. The computer architecture is described and an example of an application is provided. (31 references) (Author/CLB)

Examines the differences between concrete and abstract concepts and their implications for instructional design and teaching. How specific concepts are stored in and retrieved from memory is described, analogies are discussed as an instructional tool in abstract concept learning, and a possible instructional strategy for teaching abstract concepts…