Training paradigms were used to pinpoint key obstacles to covariation judgment accuracy among children, adolescents, and adults. The majority of junior high subjects, even when given training, failed to learn the rule. Fourth through eighth grade subjects could be taught to compare two sums in the sum-of-diagonals rule. (RH)

Research data is presented to support special education approaches to personal and social development. Seventy-eight fourth- to sixth-grade handicapped students and 82 first-grade nonhandicapped students participated in the project. Promising research results suggest many questions to be addressed in future study. (JS)

Explores use of historical fiction in elementary social studies curriculum. Examines the value of historical fiction for children and social studies goals it supports. Offers suggestions for using historical fiction in primary and intermediate grades and recommends specific books. (RWB)

Explores content or contextual validity of social rule classifications produced by sample of 12-year-old child coders. Analyses of variances revealed that categorization schemes generated by child coders were contextually valid as determined by raters' mean ratings. (Author/RWB)

Among kindergarten children, second-, fifth-grade, and college students, a gradual age-related increase was found in the ability to interpret an event from another person's perspective in light of that person's prior experiences. Various alternative explanations for the developmental trend were evaluated with data from subjects receiving prompts…

Describes two experiments that investigated the effects of two thematic retrieval cues on the types of information recalled from short stories by elementary school children and adults. Shows adults and fourth graders, but not younger children, spontaneously generated thematic retrieval plans which enabled them to remember information from both…

Compares kindergartners' and third and sixth graders' understanding of an illusion reported by the philosopher John Locke, in which two hands simultaneously experience two different temperatures from a container of water at one temperature. (HOD)

To examine children's comprehension monitoring (CM) ability more comprehensively, this study treated CM as a complex phenomenon involving multidimensional evaluation and regulation procedures and used several different measures to assess them. Results highlight the sensitivity of different measures and the importance of treating CM as a…

Seven experiments examined word triplet recall of second graders, fifth graders, and college adults. Results include findings that successful cued recall in children is more dependent than that of adults on associative constraint provided in an episode and cue, and that children make relatively better use of thematic and subordinate than of…

Examines reading awareness and comprehension skills to discover the developmental and instructional relationships between metacognition and performance. Half of the third- and fifth-grade subjects received four months of classroom instruction on reading strategies. Results of pre- and posttests and interviews revealed that the instruction…

Assesses the degree of difficulty parents attribute to specific socialization tasks; explores the relation between parents' perceived difficulty and children's perceived and actual competence in these two domains; and determines whether the ease or difficulty of these child rearing tasks, as perceived by parents, varies as a function of the…

Observes 75 first- and third-grade children in their classroom mathematics seatwork to test assumptions drawn from Vygotsky's theory about the development of private speech and its relationship to task performance, attention, and motor behaviors accompanying task orientation. (HOD)

Examined the relationship between 7-, 9-, and 11-year old children's performance on a battery of selected Piagetian measures and on a proportional reasoning task. Found a strong relationship between stage level and (1) the complexity of hypotheses used, (2) the use of the proportional hypothesis, and (3) the overall use of logical hypotheses. (HOD)

Conceptual analysis of two perspective-taking tasks identified a number of subtasks calling for equivalent operations of social reasoning within tasks of different content. Subtasks hypothetically formed a logical and developmental sequence of abilities required for decentering. The developmental significance of the hierarchy was tested among 121…

Assesses the effect of same and different recognition experience intervening between acquisition and retrieval on cued recall for episodic information. Second and fourth graders and college adults were shown cue-target word pairs at acquisition and the cues alone at retrieval. In general, results showed that same experience facilitated memory for…