This 10th-grade unit in Minnesota's "language-centered" curriculum introduces the complexity of linguistic meaning by demonstrating the relationships among linguistic symbols, their referents, their interpreters, and the social milieu. The unit begins with a discussion of Ray Bradbury's "The Kilimanjaro Machine," which…

Recall lists were presented to 40 black lower class and 40 white middle class children in this experiment. The purpose of the study was to examine a possible explanation of the relatively poor performance of black and lower class children on tasks requiring abstract learning abilities. It was reasoned that the threshold for the production of…

To assess children's ability to draw inferences from selections of children's literature and to measure the significance of various selected factors to this ability was the problem of this study. Children (432) were evenly divided among grades 4, 5, and 6 and randomly divided at each grade level into two equal groups, one of which read the…

This study investigated the effects of instruction in reflective thinking upon impulsive fourth grade students and the transfer effects of this instruction on a classroom social studies test. Thirty impulsive subjects from a white, low socio-economic area school were identified. Treatment and impulsivity were examined as they influenced…

The problem of this study was to determine if there was any difference in fourth, fifth, and sixth grade children's ability to learn the materials in an anthropology unit, "Concept of Culture," designed for the fourth grade and developed by the Anthropology Curriculum Project. Major emphasis of the unit was given to an understanding of…

The social studies curriculum guide for kindergarteners is based upon the idea that thinking is sequentially learned and developed. The aim of the program is to help children develop the tools of reasoning. Emphasis is on the introduction of cognitive tasks involving concept formation and requiring students to list, group, identify, and label…

This handbook for educators and parents discusses the need to include philosophy in the elementary classroom. The authors point out that as a question-raising discipline, philosophy is appropriate to guide children's natural inquisitiveness through the educational process. It encourages intellectual resourcefulness and flexibility which can enable…

A 3-year experiment evaluated the effectiveness of the Pyramid program, an educational program for young children from deprived situations and based on two concepts: psychological nearness (principles of attachment theory) and psychological distance (derived from developmental distancing, or the growing ability of a child to comprehend that an…

The way students, aged 12 through 16, ascribed meaning to coded words representing historical terms, based on contextual clues, was studied. Intelligence, grammatical ability, cultural background, and interest in history were also examined. (Author/MH)

Five studies examined the effect of dysphoric mood on perceivers' subjective unitization of an observed other's ongoing behavior into discrete meaningful actions. Dysphoria generally reduced unitization rate (i.e., number of actions discriminated). Additional evidence indicates this reduction results from failure to initiate a higher (more…

Two experiments assessed whether children's difficulty with word problems can be attributed to difficulty in comprehending abstract or ambiguous language. The subjects were 38 first-, 36 second-, and 36 third-graders. The resulting theory of arithmetic word problem solving may represent a theoretical problem-solving model. (TJH)

Studies 94 undergraduate students in introductory statistics and computer science courses. Applies Formal Operations Reasoning Test (FORT) and Kolb's Learning Style Inventory (LSI). Finds that substantial numbers of students have not achieved the formal operation level of cognitive maturity. Emphasizes need to examine students learning style and…

The use of strategies is an important part of mathematical thinking. Presented are several games that help develop the reasoning strategies of hypothesis making and testing, proving and disproving, looking for patterns, and simplifying a difficult task. (MDH)

This study contributes to a growing body of research on the development of elementary teacher's content knowledge of mathematics. Individual clinical interviews were conducted with preservice elementary teachers (N=21) enrolled in a professional development course called "Foundations of Mathematics for Teachers." An instrument that…

Cognitive science research offers hope for the development of innovative science teaching strategies that facilitate the development of optimally interconnected procedural and declarative knowledge networks. Improving students' neural networks should improve their abilities to think critically, reason logically, learn more efficiently, and solve…