Describes and analyzes a learning episode in which two children in year 4 interact with each other and their teacher while playing a probability game involving chocolate M&Ms. Children developed key ideas in probability from a game that was designed to produce cognitive conflict. (ASK)

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,…

Despite the current emphasis on thinking skills and the resulting concentration on lists and taxonomies that do not succeed beyond research contexts, all reflective people know that critical thought relies not on applying mental steps but on simply trying to figure out what might be right or wrong. This depends on one basic cognitive act,…

A long-standing issue in cognitive psychology is the question of content effects upon problem-solving skills, that is, do students' problem-solving abilities generalize across specific subject matter domains? Although Piaget argued that formal reasoning strategies are independent of content, the well-known decalogs of Piaget can be interpreted as…

This study reports the development of a sentence preference test designed to contrast tendencies to abstract, generalise and particularise in thinking. (Editor)

The task consisted of categorizing a set of slides depicting concepts of freedom, nonfreedom, justice, and nonjustice. The results of the analysis indicated that abstract thinkers performed significantly better than did concrete thinkers and that performance increased as a function of grade level. (Author/BJG)

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…

The interrelationships among young adults' levels of moral reasoning, their preferred discipline style, and how they reason with children on moral issues was investigated. After initial screening, 25 males and 25 females completed a test on defining issues of moral judgement. Then 20 subjects were classified at the high principled level, and 30 at…

Two experiments were designed to assess children's ability to understand recursive structures of thinking which include thinking about contiguous people, thinking about action between people, thinking about thinking, and thinking about thinking about thinking. In Experiment I, 32 second, fourth, sixth, and eighth graders were tested on eight tasks…

Early childhood learning of language has led some to postulate innate knowledge of an abstract symbolic linguistic system. However, if the child's abstract understanding initially requires concrete support in the form of agreement of the message with his nonlinguistic experience, the indication would be that the development of syntactic…

Investigating the effects of marijuana on human psychological functioning, this study differs from previous research in two ways: 1) it is concerned with relatively complex cognitive processes; 2) it has a theoretical rationale. The general hypothesis of the study states that marijuana will impair its user's ability to form and use abstract…

The conversion model of formal reasoning was examined for its ability to predict the decisions made by college students when solving concrete and abstract syllogisms. Results supported the model's contentions that reasoner's decisions reflect natural language processes in the encoding of syllogistic premises, and follow rationally from…

Discusses critical thinking as the process of moving fluently among abstraction levels. Defines three components involved in fluency of movement: (1) knowledge, or an awareness of the existence of abstraction levels; (2) payoff, or the reason for acquiring fluency; and (3) timing, or a consciousness of abstraction levels at a given time and place.…

According to Humean framework, relations are judged to be causal to extent that they are characterized by regularity, continuity, and covariation among college students and college-bound 11- and 14-year-olds. Presents subjects with information about one of the following indices: potential causal factor covaried with effect and potential causal…