Comments on the articles presented in this issue devoted to the Japanese perspectives on conceptual change. Suggests that different approaches to knowledge acquisition and conceptual change should be carefully examined in light of their implications for the teaching of science. Discusses critically the issues advanced from the Japanese…

Adolescents with mental retardation viewed a story enacted with props and were asked questions about the knowledge and beliefs of the characters. Subjects performed worse than did nondisabled children matched for mental age. Subjects did better on questions requiring first-order reasoning than on those involving second-order reasoning. (Author/JDD)

One of the most challenging daily experiences of teaching young adolescents is helping them transition from Piaget's concrete to the formal operational stage of cognitive development during the middle school years. Students who have reached formal operations can design and test hypotheses, engage in deductive reasoning, use flexible thinking,…

Developed in response to deficiencies in verbal and quantitative skills demonstrated by students entering New Jersey colleges and taking the New Jersey Basic Skills Placement Test, this overview is designed to help interested educators orient themselves to the important and rapidly growing field of thinking skills instruction. The Task Force on…

Deductive reasoning problems were presented to 72 public elementary school students, half of whom were identified as gifted (mean age of 9.6 years) and half of whom were regular education students (mean age of 9.3 years). They were used to test an hypothesis that gifted children who score significantly higher than average on standardized…

Reasoning and logical thinking can be defined and explained from different perspectives. Three approaches are reviewed in this report; they are: (1) the logical structure approach; (2) the Piagetian approach of developmental stages; and (3) the information processing or memory approach. Four hypotheses related to these approaches were investigated…

In a study, few subjects accepted empirical evidence of nonconservation of discontinuous quantity and weight. These findings were interpreted as support for the organismic-developmental claim that lower forms of reasoning are transformed into structurally more advanced forms. (Author/ED)

This research explored the development of reasoning about persuasion. First-grade, seventh-grade, and undergraduate subjects were individually presented with a hypothetical persuasive situation in which a young child attempts to obtain a toy from various "targets." Pairs of tape-recorded persuasive appeals were randomly presented to each…

Two experiments involving 42 students from the Model Secondary School for the Deaf investigated both the visual and tactile components in the processing of spatial information. Test measures used were the Figures Rotations Test, Group Embedded Figures Test, and Tactile Rotations Test. The study suggested that spatial reasoning is a determining…

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…

Investigates several key statements from Piaget's cognitive psychology and their meaning for science education. Concludes that teaching must be conducted as reversibly as possible so that when the teacher presents his own assimilation schemata it will be equilibrated by the pupils' schemata. (GA)

Problems in teaching language communication to the congenitally deaf child are discussed in this essay, and then suggestions are offered for providing mental development, development of verbal and associative memory, sensory training, and training in abstract reasoning. (LBH)

In response to the previous article, Whitehurst defends his article on imitation; it is different from Beilin's structural terms, and significant because much is known about imitation. Zimmerman challenges Beilin's interpretation of Piaget's structural assumptions. Brody maintains that children's qualitative changes in moral reasoning are best…

Four tasks which are frequently used to evaluate adolescent reasoning skill: (1) the pendulum task; (2) the ramp problem; (3) the cart experiment; and (4) the invisible magnetism experiment are analyzed to determine the Piagetian concepts that each measures. (CP)