The use of young children's drawings as aids in assessing their levels of cognitive development and their readiness for reading is recommended in this paper. After showing how drawing development can be examined from a Piagetian point of view, the paper reports on an investigation involving 76 children aged five through eight years, which revealed…

Eighteen research reports related to mathematics education are abstracted and analyzed in this publication. Three of the reports deal with aspects of learning theory, seven with topics in mathematics instruction (problem solving, weight, quadratic inequalities, probability and statistics, area and volume conservation, cardinality), five with…

The effects of live and symbolic modeling on the conservation of equalities and inequalities were studied with items spanning three stimulus dimensions (length, number, and two dimensional space). A total of 48 kindergarten children, who had failed to conserve on any equality items in baseline measures, were randomly assigned, in equal groups, to…

Analysis of 65 children over a 4-year period on tests of operational and causal thinking offers support for Piaget's notion of stage progression. In kindergarten and grade one, the majority of children in this longitudinal study were between preoperational and the achievement stage of operational thought. By grade two, the majority had attained…

The present study was designed to determine whether conservation of number, weight, volume, area, and mass could be learned and retained by disadvantaged preschool children when taught by an inexperienced classroom teacher. An instructional sequence of 10-minute lessons was presented on alternate days over a 3 1/2 week period by preservice…

A conservation problem of numerical equivalence which 80% of adults reliably fail and 40% of third graders pass was developed, and responses of 188 subjects (Grades 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11 and college) to it and related number conservation and probability problems indicated that the differences in nonconservation were rooted in subjects' different…

This study attempts to determine if individual differences in multitask performance are due in part to the cognitive competence (i.e., the consistent, rule-based strategy) the subject brings to the task. A battery of learning (discrimination shift, transposition, incidental learning and paired-associate learning), cognitive-developmental…

Debates as to the appropriateness of using the Karplus Islands Puzzle as an instrument to assess formal-operational thought. (CP)

Appraises the respective contribution of initial competence and of imitation of modeled response in the observational learning of conservation among first grade children. (HOD)

Over 1000 out of 4000 preschoolers observed conserved identity of matter over time and roughly two-thirds of the 1000 also conserved equivalence. Follow-up showed no correlation between kindergarten conservation abilities and grade one math performance but significant correlations between equivalence conservation by end of kindergarten and grade…

Explores the cognitive development of Nepalese students by administering Piagetian-type tasks and comparing geographically and culturally different children. Boys and girls (N=256) of ages 8, 10, and 12 were administered tasks of conservation, classification and seriation, and causality. Implications for curriculum development in Nepal are made.…

Two experiments were designed to investigate among kindergarten through third-grade children the development of character constancy -- the belief that other's or self's personality characteristics are stable across time and do not change despite changes in appearance. It is proposed that character constancy of self and other is a product of both…

Kindergartners who received learning-set instruction on unidimensional classification, unidimensional seriation, and number conservation were retested at the end of first grade. Followup tests showed that the cognitive advantage and improved academic achievement gained from that teaching method was generally present 15 months later. However, a…

Advocated is the use of everyday games and situations instead of the traditional use of textbooks, workbooks, and worksheets. New goals and principles for the beginning arithmetic student are presented. Modifications of activities that promote the constructivist ideal are included. (KR)