Programed instruction accelerated the ability of 62 children, ages four to six, in acquiring the concept of number conservation. (CP)

Attainment relative to six cognitive operations and four number and computational skills was assessed for 90 elementary students using clinical procedures. Variance associated with conservation of number, seriation, and logical classification competency accounted for a significant proportion of the variance in achievement scores. (Author/MK)

This study found that 23 hearing-impaired and 25 normally hearing children (ages 7-14) did not differ on nonverbal intelligence, but the hearing-impaired children obtained lower scores than normally hearing peers on a social decentration task and a nonsocial decentration task. Social decentration was positively correlated with nonsocial…

Examined were children's conception of changes in the state of matter and their understanding of the reversibility of the process. The relationship between children's intuitive ideas about matter, as observed in this study, and their logical ability to conserve weight is discussed. (CW)

The study with 23 severely hearing impaired adolescents found that subjects using cued speech performed highest on Piagetian conservation problems, the oral-aural group performed better on linguistically-sensitive metaphor problems. Differences were not, however, statistically significant. (Author/DB)

Assessing Markman's hypothesis that the organizational principles underlying collection concepts facilitate children's performance on cognitive tasks requiring part-whole comparisons, three experiments indicated that the facilitative effect of collection labels appears to be specific to the class-inclusion task. Results suggest that Markman's…

Investigated was the learning of the mathematical uses of "more,""fewer," and "less" at a very early stage in the development of ideas. (CW)

Dutch researchers investigated the effects of Obuchova's method of teaching measurement to kindergarten children with no knowledge of conservation or seriation. Results indicated training was highly effective. Skills were transferred to conservation tasks not taught in training. Transfer to concepts not included in training was also observed. (SM)

Describes study that investigated whether the use of LOGO accelerates cognitive development of five- and seven-year-old kindergarten students as measured by Piagetian-based tests of conservation of length, number, and ability to identify geometric shapes. Pretests and posttests are described and directions for future research are given.…

Findings that six-year-old children perform substantially better in a conservation of number task if they are asked one question instead of two were upheld when mass and volume materials were used and the age range of subjects was extended to include five- through eight-year-old children. (RH)

Discusses the definition of energy found in many high school and college level physics texts, the conflict of that definition with the second law of thermodynamics, and the relation to the concept of the conservation of energy. Suggests not using a definition of energy and provides some alternative strategies. (JM)

Two experiments tested whether children fail to make transitive inferences because they forget the premises. Children did not justify incorrect inferences by incorrect premises. Results between nontransitive and transitive inferers parallelled similar studies with nonconserver- conserver dyads and were viewed as reinforcing the commonality between…

Discusses the deficiencies of presenting the theme of energy in the current West German school textbooks. The article emphasizes the structural importance of entropy for the understanding of energy and suggests how the physics teacher can contribute to the development of an appropriate attitude toward the energy crisis. (HM)

Bogartz questions the Anderson and Cuneo study (p335-78 of this issue) on statistical-methodological grounds and on their positions concerning the concepts of conservation, centration, and compensation. (For Anderson and Cuneo's rejoinder to Bogartz, see p388-92 of this journal issue.) (SJL)

A nonverbal paradigm for assessing conservation based on an operant discrimination learning procedure is described. Initial results suggest that young children who could not conserve within the traditional verbal procedure were more likely to demonstrate conservation within the nonverbal paradigm and that traditional Piagetian tasks are verbally…