Environmental influences on the development of children's reflective capacities and their knowledge of freehand drawing were investigated among preschool, kindergarten and first-grade children. One aspect of the social context of drawing was considered: the interactions that take place when children draw in the company of peers. Tapes of…

This paper reported the results of a study designed to determine whether certain instructional strategies are superior to others in teaching problem solving to high school chemistry students. The effectiveness of four instructional strategies for teaching problem solving to students of various proportional reasoning ability, verbal and visual…

Identification of the basic skills and roles in field experience education should answer the question "Can and should educators identify a set of basic skills required for effective performance in experiential learning as part of general education?" New roles required of students in using experiential learning opportunities include initiator,…

Recent literature on children's conceptions of social institutions is reviewed, and the results of a pilot study on children's concepts of human rights are described. A series of interview questions was developed based on rights specified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Questions in Part I of the interview concerned a presumed…

Ninety Swedish teenagers and adults with varying levels of formal education were interviewed about their own learning experiences and techniques. Subjects were then asked what they actually meant by learning. The concept was variously defined as: (1) an increase in knowledge (merely a synonym for the word learning); (2) memorizing; (3) an…

A 64-item analogy test was developed and administered to 55 college students enrolled in a noncredit reading improvement course to assess the effects of an instructional unit in taking analogy tests. The instructional unit was a 35-page self-instructional booklet that described the most common formats of analogy testing, defined eight types of…

WRITTEN TO IMPLEMENT THE PRINCIPLES SET FORTH IN "DESIGN FOR THINKING" (SEE TE 000 457.), THIS BOOK DEALS WITH WORDS AS TOOLS OF THOUGHT AND WITH THE PROBLEM-SOLVING FUNCTION OF LANGUAGE. CHAPTERS ARE ON (1) QUALIFICATION, CLASSIFICATION, AND ABSTRACTION, (2) SIGNS, REPRESENTATIONS, SYMBOLS, AND MATRICES, (3) ANALYSIS (BY CLASSIFICATION,…

In order to directly relate research on children's thinking to curriculum development in the social studies, this study approximates the conditions and substances of daily classroom life and examines the levels of abstraction in children's thinking about complex social problems. The subjects include 210 boys and girls in equal numbers in grades…

Middle and upper class 3- and 4-year-old children were exposed to three consecutive 5-week treatment conditions in the naturalistic setting of a half-day laboratory nursery school program. During the first treatment condition, the teacher emphasized low level cognitive questions; during the second, high level cognitive questions; and during the…

The paper endeavors to delineate more clearly the special reading comprehension problem of the Alaskan Eskimo and Indian. Reading comprehension is essentially a cognitive process -- the ability to engage in rigorous abstract thinking. A number of formal anthropological reports indicate that Alaskan natives, especially the Eskimo, are deficient in…

This research is, in part, a study of a method of differentiating between two different types of retardation (the exogenous or brain injured and the endogenous or non-brain injured). However, this paper is also an example of the evaluation of a research problem, for it incorporates data and information from three different studies, each of which…

An experiment was conducted to investigate three topics of current interest in education: critical thinking, programed instruction, and aptitude-treatment interaction. Thirty college students and 31 ninth graders with extreme discrepancies between their verbal and quantitative aptitude scores were taught eight principles of class reasoning by…

Assuming that an infant's first stage of verbal communication is melodic and the result of controlling the motion of the vocal cords, a question arises concerning the second stage in development. Is it the shaping of the oral cavity of the direction of the articulators? The author's observation of an infant through his first year of development…

Describes two interactive computer programs that simulate abstract relationships and require students to use inductive reasoning, form and test hypotheses, and analyze functions of systems and the reasoning processes required to understand them. Their development and use in college philosophy of science courses is outlined, and possible future…

Using data on approximately 2,000 students drawn from three talent searches conducted by the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, this study investigated the relationship of possible sex differences in science achievement to sex differences in mathematical reasoning ability. (BS)