Analogical reasoning is frequently used in acquisition of mathematical concepts. Concrete representations used to teach mathematics are essentially analogs of mathematical concepts, and it is argued that analogies enter into mathematical concept acquisition in numerous other ways as well. According to Gentner's theory, analogies entail a…

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…

Part of a series of philosophical readers, this story for elementary school children presents two characters, Kio and Gus, who are sensitive to ideas, language, and the world around them. The book consists largely of dialogue as each character narrates his/her story. In the course of a summer, Kio visits his grandfather's farm and befriends Gus,…

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…

Discusses students' inability to make the connection between manipulative materials and pencil-and-paper calculations in mathematics instruction. Outlines the development of mathematical ideas through the concrete, representational, and abstract phases of instruction. An annotated bibliography listing teacher resources for representational-level…

Children's understanding of Euclidian space was investigated using three Piaget-type tasks to examine the ability of children to quantitatively locate a point in one, two, and three dimensions. Among the findings were that a disagreement exists between Piaget's data and the results of this study. (BT)

A cross-sectional study examined age differences in children's conceptions of early U.S. history. Students in grades 2, 3, 6, and 8 (n=281) were asked to respond to a question about how the United States became a country. Their essays show significant changes with age. Older students were more likely to include errors of historical fact in their…

Ratings of concreteness and picturability and production data for meaningfulness of 310 words were gathered from sixth-grade children and college students. (JMB)

Comparison of elementary grade students with (N=42) or without (N=42) learning disabilities (LD) on their logical-mathematical structures of thought found that, though both groups generated grouping relationships, children with LD tendered to generate solutions showing less coordinated structures of thought. For both groups, scores on the…

This study examined above-grade-level abstract reasoning abilities of 150 students (grades 2-6). Understanding of abstract concepts varied by age for only four of eight subscales or concepts: probability, proportion, momentum, and frames of reference. Performance varied widely within age level for the understanding of volume, correlation,…

Author attempted to outline a concept of logic that involves standards of correct reasoning as well as some idea of how these might be carried out in a classroom. (Author/RK)

This study compared the performance of 51 gifted Caucasian children on the Stanford Binet LM and the Stanford Binet Fourth Edition (SB4) to determine whether significantly different scores would be obtained. The 33 male and 18 female subjects were from middle and upper-middle class families in a western urban area. Their developmental histories,…

An experiment concerning children's conceptions of price was conducted to investigate the influence of the context of a problem on its apprehension. A total of 120 children of several age groups (nursery school, grades 2, 4, and 6) were interviewed individually. An initial question was asked ("Why does a bun cost about one Swedish…

The purpose of this study was to provide a more complete understanding of the storage and retrieval processes of developmentally different youngsters. Forty-four second and fourth grade subjects were given a lesson consisting of 25 facts to learn and remember. Half of the group learned the facts in a context containing superordinate statements…

Two experiments compared the cognitive maps (mental representations of the spatial environment) of first graders, fifth graders and college students, and investigated developmental changes in the ability to manipulate cognitive maps mentally. In the first experiment, subjects were asked to move from stationpoint to stationpoint and at each, to…