Israeli children's (kindergarten to grade nine) explanations about the water cycle are described. Reports the children's views about the source of clouds and the mechanism of rainfall. It was concluded that understanding evaporation is a necessary condition for explaining a mechanism of rain containing the ideas of condensation and heaviness. (YP)

Conservation and metaphor acquisition were studied in 35 hearing-impaired children (ages 6-19) using either cued speech or oral-aural communication. Significant positive relationships were found between conservation and metaphor in both communication modes, age and metaphor, and age and conservation. Neither conservation nor metaphor was related…

Two studies demonstrated dissociation between preschoolers' understanding of pictorial and mental representations. Results showed that false picture tasks were significantly easier than false belief tasks. There was no correlation between performance on the two. Children were trained on false belief, false picture, or number conservation tasks;…

A study was conducted to investigate the respective contributions of personal and social factors (initial competence and imitation of modeled responses) in children's observational learning of conservation. Subjects included 180 first-grade nonconservers from six schools attended by French-speaking middle class pupils. All subjects failed…

A study was designed to develop an instrument and methodological procedure to assess transitive relations within seriation problems in elementary school children using three criteria: explanations, judgments, and strategies. A secondary analysis to assess transitivity used the three criteria according to whether the children were conservers, in…

The work reported in this paper is one segment of a larger project which began in 1971, a project aimed at assisting practicing school psychologists to update their knowledge and skills. Efforts were directed at getting the psychologists to update their knowledge and skills. Efforts were directed at getting the psychologists to include in their…

Eighty-two children (ages 4.4 to 6.5 years) were administered a Backward Digit Span test to measure M-space and four conservation tasks (number, substance, continuous quantity, and weight). Based upon a neo-Piagetian theory of intellectual development proposed by Pascual-Leone (1969), two hypotheses were tested: (1) A significant relation should…

Two studies explored the possibility of inducing conservation understanding in intellectually normal preschoolers and mildly mentally retarded children of comparable mental age. Retarded children, MA 3-10 to 5-0, received Verbal Rule instruction. Three- and 4-year-old children were given Verbal Rule training in a 2 x 2 x 2 factorial design…

This study explores the relationships between nonconservation, conservation, field dependence/field independence and the following school variables: achievement, screening measures, sex and race. A sample of 72 students in grade one in a southern rural elementary school were grouped into three sections by ability and given a series of tests.…

The role of language in conservation tasks and the development of the concept of conservation of quantity in young children are investigated in this study. A total of 50 children, aged 3.0 to 4.7 years, were divided into three groups according to age with a large number clustered around age 4.0 years. Children were randomly assigned to one of two…

To replicate the findings of a previous experiment in which it was shown that the systematic presentation of rules and feedback on conservation and conservation-related problems can be employed to teach young children the traditional (Piagetian) liquid quantity problem rapidly, an analysis was made of the role of two others variables: (1) use of…

A total of 186 kindergarteners were pretested on number conservation and two cognitive style measures representing Kagan's impulsivity-reflectivity dimension and Santostefano's leveling-sharpening dimension. From this sample 72 nonconservers were assigned to one of three conservation training conditions: reversibility training, discrimination…

Following an analysis of work in the area of relationships between concept development and social development, a preliminary research project carried out to examine these relationships is discussed. Piaget's "The Language and Thought of the Child" served as a springboard for the past and present investigations. In the experiment…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of perceptual focus and planar orientation of rods on conservation responses when parallel translations are utilized. The translations along the major axes of symmetry utilized two modes: (1) translation of one of two rods, and (2) simultaneous translation of two of three rods in opposite…

The purposes of this study were to: (1) determine the influence of a series of experiences involving the equivalence relation "same length as" and the asymmetric transitive relations "longer than" and "shorter than" on the ability of first and second grade children to classify and seriate objects on the basis of length; (2) investigate the…