In this article, I examine changes in the field of cognitive development and in my own thinking over the past 40 years. The review focuses on three periods. In the first, Piaget's theory was dominant, and my research and that of many others was aimed at understanding the many fascinating changes in children's thinking that Piaget documented and at…

This paper questions evidence for the thesis that causal reasoning of older children is more logical than that of younger ones, and describes two experiments which attempted to determine (1) whether there are true developmental differences in causal reasoning, and (2) what explanations for developmental differences can be supported. In the first…

The rule assessment approach was used to examine five-, eight-, eleven-, and twenty-year-olds' concepts of time, speed, and distance. (CM)

Describes and discusses the rule-assessment approach, a new research strategy for studying developmental sequences in children's acquisition of knowledge. Four experiments were conducted to illustrate the utility of this approach across a variety of concepts and a wide range of ages (three-year-olds to college students). (Author/CM)