The LOGO programing language developed for children includes a set of primitive graphics commands that control the displacement and rotation of a display screen cursor called a turtle. The purpose of this study was to examine 4- to 7-year-olds' understanding of single turtle commands as transformations that connect turtle states and to…

A unit is described for teaching audience analysis in a high school expository writing course. The five main sections of the unit are (1) an analysis of audience as part of writing, (2) the writer as a decision maker, (3) testing audience reaction during the composing process, (4) post-communication audience reaction assessment, and (5)…

The relational concepts developed in mathematics and psychology are used in this paper to explicate the needs and responsibilities of dramatic acting and theatre research. A parallel is constructed between the emergence of the mathematical concept of function, the awakening of psychology to the concept of relationship (especially regarding family…

This paper reports attempts to alter children's moral judgments via short-term training of roletaking skills in order to assess the degree of relationship between moral reasoning and roletaking. In a three phase procedure, 40 first-grade children (20 males and 20 females) were assigned to one of four experimental groups (empathic, reciprocal,…

A measure of role-taking skill was administered individually to 12 male and 8 female preschoolers. In addition the children were observed during free play on 30 consecutive school days, and their behaviors were coded according to Parten's social participation categories. Significant negative relationships were found to exist between the…

Targets of educational reform in the United States have included classroom teachers, students, and school structure. Increasingly, nonstructural aspects of schooling are being examined as avenues to educational improvement. The purpose of this study was to investigate differences among professional staff members' perceptions of being in a…

For children to understand history, they need to be able to see the world through the eyes of its participants, and to understand that there are multiple perspectives on the past. This paper focuses on relating theory to practice in history and social studies teaching and curriculum design, emphasizing that historical perspective-taking and…

To refine methodology, a study was made of how 52 first-, third-, and fifth-grade boys and girls understood feelings in themselves and their parents. It was expected that older children would use more complex criteria than younger children and that differences would result from the number of points of view subjects had to consider to answer a…

Shifting theoretical perspectives of intercollegiate policy debate, especially the changing affirmative case constructs, warrant reformulations of various strategies open to the negative case such as those developed by W. Ulrich, R. Dempsey, and D. Hartmann. Options open to the affirmative have increased, e.g., the comparative advantages case, the…

To explain the role of empathy in forms of prosocial behavior, two studies were conducted to examine the relationships among different dimensions of empathy, communication, and prosocial behavior. Study one tested three models hypothesized to explain this process, an altruistic model, an egoistic model, and a dual-process model combining aspects…

Although role or perspective taking has been considered important for the development of mature social thought and behavior, and training for perspective taking has been used to remediate deficient behavior, few studies with either normal or disturbed populations have examined naturally occurring behaviors expected to correlate with…

Traditionally, social psychology has conceptualized sex and gender as subject variables with sex as a biological substrate and gender as a sociocultural consequence of sex. These ideas rest on the assumption of two distinct biological categories. However, gender is better thought of in dialectical rather than oppositional terms. Gender is both…

An investigation was undertaken to further the conceptual and operational nature of interpersonal solidarity. Specifically, the investigation considered additional criterial attributes of solidarity to those previously studied by L. R. Wheeless. The sample consisted of 162 adults drawn from elementary and secondary school teachers, college…

This study examines the possibility that ability to avoid detection of deceptive behavior via nonverbal behavior might be related to an individual's role-taking skill. Sixty-one 5 to 12 year-old boys and girls were led to be verbally deceptive or truthful by saying that they either had enjoyed or not enjoyed an unpleasant experience or had enjoyed…

This study examined the role that perspective taking played in preservice teachers' perceptions and analysis of a video teaching case. Participants were 84 preservice teachers from various course levels (introductory courses, methods courses, and student teaching courses). The preservice teachers were asked to take the perspective of either the…