Complex problem solving (CPS) as a cross-curricular competence has recently attracted more attention in educational psychology as indicated by its implementation in international educational large-scale assessments such as the Programme for International Student Assessment. However, research on the development of CPS is scarce, and the few…

Age-related changes in children's performance on simple division problems (e.g., 6 divided by 2, 72 divided by 9) were investigated by asking children in Grades 4 through 7 to solve 32 simple division problems. Differences in performance were found across grade, with younger children performing more slowly and less accurately than older children.…

This paper provides a detailed empirical account of the performances of 8- to 9-year-olds and 11- to 12-year-olds on a chore-scheduling task developed to assess the dynamics of planning processes. In developing the planning task for revealing different levels of planning proficiency, five critical aspects of planning were taken into account: the…

This article examines naive conceptions of spatial reference that children bring to Logo programing language learning. Students from Grades 4, 5, 6, and 8 were introduced to six Logo commands, and then were tested on predicting the output for instances of each of the commands. (Author/LMO)

The cognitive determinants of number series completion performance were studied by presenting a systematic set of problems to college adults and to average- and high-IQ elementary school children. In each group, a combination of process and content-knowledge variables accounted for more than 70 percent of the variance in solution difficulty.…

The hypothesis of positive skew in distributions of response to creative thinking tasks was studied. Data were obtained from examinees' responses to problem-solving tasks in three published studies of creative thinking. Subjects included 23 fifth graders (12 females and 11 males), 29 high school students (10 females and 19 males), and 47 female…

Using data from the Survey of Basic Skills administered to approximately 300,000 California sixth graders, this study examines sex differences on two types of mathematics items. Probability for success is greater for girls in solving computations and for boys in solving story problems. Relationships to other influential factors are examined.

Patterns of assistance in parent-child dyads were examined by developing measures that could be used to explore the nature of assistance and learner action sequences. A microgenetic approach was adopted in a teaching experiment that may be regarded as a variation of the double stimulation method of L. S. Vygotsky. A second goal was to explore the…

Testwise responses of grade-school students to multiple-choice science items and the intercorrelations between different testwiseness skills were examined in this document. A total of 134 third-grade, 133 fifth-grade, and 143 sixth-grade students from two elementary schools in a large suburban school district in Utah responded to 60 science items…

Potential gender-related differences in the process of mathematical word problem solving were investigated. Sixth and eighth graders (n=302) solved 2-step mathematical word problems using a 9-step problem solving plan. The nine steps were: (1) identify the facts; (2) identify the question; (3) draw a diagram; (4) choose the operations; (5) write…