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According to Piaget's theory, maturation of the nervous system is sufficient for the development of formal thought. If this were the case, the job of the educational system would be small indeed. Rather, maturation determines only the totality of possibilities and impossibilities at a given stage. This study investigates whether instructional procedures can be designed and employed to successfully affect the transition from concrete to formal cognitive functioning in fifth and seventh-grade students with regard to one aspect of formal thought. Thirty-two fifth grade students and 32 seventh-grade students enrolled in an elementary school and a junior high school in Lafayette, California, served as subjects. Results suggest that instructional procedures can affect the transition from concrete to formal cognitive functioning in fifth- and seventh-grade students. Some implications for teaching are also discussed. (Contains 4 tables and 1 figure.)

Investigated whether dropouts and other students having difficulty with physics could be identified by including mathematics reasoning items along with mathematics skill items on a 13-item mathematics pretest and by using records of past performance in conjunction with the pretest. Sample included 483 students in an introductory, noncalculus, preprofessional physics course. (JN)

Female education majors in a physical science course were given a set of tasks analogous to a given, solved prototype-task to investigate how transfer items were handled. Also used a conceptual model along with the solved prototype and a general procedure for applying the conceptual model to the transfer items. (Author/JN)

Inference tasks emphasizing the acceptance of lack of closure (ALC), memory, and hypothetico-deductive reasoning were administered to 67 males and 74 females ranging in age from 5 to 12 years. Results suggest that the relationship of ALC to age is mediated by memory development rather than by logical development. (JMB)

This study, conducted with seventh graders, lends support to the Piagetian hypothesis that the development of formal operations is a prerequisite for the effective learning of the proportions concept. (MK)

Three research questions are explored relating the psychological phenomenon of premature closure to (1) age, (2) Piagetian developmental level, and (3) ability to generate hypothetico-deductive strategies. Children (N=141) in grades 1-6 were interviewed and administered light-and-button tasks to describe these relationships. (CS)

The pendulum and balance beam were studied. The principal question addressed was whether students could substantially and quickly benefit from a teaching strategy explicitly designed to promote transfer. About half the subjects could acquire in brief time a procedure for transferring knowledge to novel tasks. (MP)

Reports on a classroom technique (social interaction) for improving fifth-grade students' performance in the task domain of controlling variables. The technique involved asking students why something happened, asking for justification/evidence, suggesting alternative explanations and asking for evaluation of the same, and accepting explanation only after all reasonable alternatives were ruled out. (Author/JN)

After discussing task-specific information and form/content dissociation, presents evidence from training studies which suggests ways in which the form/content distinction might guide researchers in designing diagnostic measures leading to specific instructional strategies based on the diagnostics. (Author/JN)

Reasons for college students making reversal errors translating a sentence to an equation were explored in six studies. The principal sources were haste, failure to check, failure to base the equation on the sentence meaning, and use of nonalgebraic symbols. Students could successfully check when prompted. (MNS)

Two sections of a course in physical science for elementary education majors used the balance beam. When taught to transfer from that material to others, students did much better than those who did not receive training. (MNS)

The article focuses on the cognitive learning ability of school students. Little is presently known about specific factors and how they interact to contribute to and affect the transition from concrete to formal cognitive functioning. It has been observed that students as young as second-graders have at least an intuitive notion of the formal idea of controlling variables related to cognitive ability. This idea is fully developed only during adolescence. It might be possible to utilize prior intuitive understanding to facilitate learning and stabilization of more formal (abstract) conceptualizations during adolescence. Intellectual development begins with instrumental activity, a kind of development by doing. These activities become represented and summarized by individuals in the form of particular images. Further, with the aid of symbolic notation that remains invariant across transformations in imagery, the learner gradually becomes aware of the formal or abstract properties of the things he is experiencing. These findings and statements suggest that it might be possible to design instructional sessions which will enable students to function at the formal-operational level with respect to specific concepts.

The article evaluates how education students in a physical science course handle transfer items in a set of tasks. The results show that the model and procedure strategy is an effective means for promoting transfer for the class of problems studied. The procedure component was most useful for the most novel transfer items. Students' pretest responses showed not only a lack of focus, but a lack of organization and consistency. A small proportion of students were having difficulties visualizing the spatial relations which determine an axis of rotation, or appreciating the abstract nature of the model.

The article focuses on the identification of potential dropouts from college physics classes. The study shows that the distinguishing characteristics of dropouts are not captured by the usual measures of achievement and educational experience at one's disposal. However, high-risk groups of students and dropouts can be reasonably well identified. For students who completed the course, mathematics ability is a good predictor of achievement. Also, achievement in physics appears to require abilities that go beyond the skill and reasoning aspects of algebra and trigonometry.

The article presents a study about the premature closure of children in science as well as in their developmental stages. The investigation aims to determine the manifestation of premature closure in the children's succeeding early adolescent years as well as the relationship between spontaneous ability to avoid premature closure and the ability to generate hypothetico-deductive strategies to solve complex inference tasks. One hundred and forty-one children enrolled in grades one to six were involved in the investigation where a series of tests and interviews was conducted. The results indicate vital points that suggest thorough consideration on the child's development with regards to their problem solving ability.

This article investigates the ability of seventh graders to comprehend and to effectively use the scheme of proportions in the classroom. Twenty–eight seventh–grade students enrolled in two average mathematics classes in a junior high school in Lafayette, California. All subjects were administered three Piagetian–styled conservation tasks prior to training on the conservation of weight, the conservation of volume, and displacement volume. The results showed that the active group outperformed the verbal group on all posttest tasks with differences reaching statistical significance on four of the six tasks.

The article cites a study which investigates instructional procedures for transition from concrete to formal operational level of thinking among fifth and seventh grade students. It uses an experimental pretest and posttest control group design which conducted two separate examinations. The task includes four Piagetian styled cognitive functioning that administers and controls subjects and training sessions followed by an individual interview. The performance of the adolescents determined the instruction procedures has affected the transition with respect to the ability of control variables.

This article presents an investigation of the effectiveness of concept mapping as an instructional tool in science education. It is inferred that the impact of concept mapping on achievement and attitudes is based upon using teacher-prepared maps and those created by student concept-mapping activities. A metaanalysis of the instructional tool showed that the concept mapping had medium positive effects on students' achievement and large positive effects on students' attitudes. Improved achievement was more evident in studies which used biology as their content focus.

This article examines the effectiveness of the Thinking Aloud Pair Problem Solving (TAPS) method as a strategy in teaching problem-solving in science education. The method is proposed as a valuable resource to be taught to science students for solving their own homework and personal problems. It involves students working in pairs with each person assigned a specific task. Research on peer collaboration suggest that this type of method promotes conceptual development. The use of TAPS as described in the article assumed that students bring into the course the requisite skills and abilities to address the problem-solving situations they will face. It is further assumed that the effectiveness of the thinking-aloud procedure is dependent upon a repertoire of required skills and familiarity with the content.

This article provides information on research which examined the combined effects of notetaking and self-questioning on examination performance in science with an entire combination plan of fifth and sixth grade students. Overall, gains on science examinations were found when notetaking or self-questioning strategies were in effect. The study suggested that notetaking and self-questioning training can improve student quiz performance in science. Although the use of commercially prepared material have affected the scores of lower achieving students, notetaking and self-questioning provided students with skills in reading and writing and were able to synthesize paragraph information and identify the topic and supporting details.

This article explores the design of science instruction on the physical properties of matter. Inertia, extension and gravitation are the three fundamental physical properties of matter and their measures are mass, volume and weight. The domain of application of the quantities can be determined by reviewing research studies by science educators and psychologists reporting investigations and surveying current science textbooks. To understand the quantities in physics textbooks requires the coordination of subject-matter knowledge.

This article discusses the social construction of knowledge when students are engaged in collaborative concept mapping and develops a framework for understanding concept maps from a sociologically informed point of view. It is suggested that the psychology-based conceptualization may have been appropriate for individual concept mapping, but does not provide for an appropriate framework for the collaborative construction of concept maps or the function of maps in the interaction. The concept map used as a tool for social thinking, a conscription device, and an inscription method helps in planning for group experiences and in working to better adapt the heuristic for interactive classrooms.

This article presents a study which focused on the effects of oral communication rate on net recall or the amount of correct information recalled from an audio learning task. The main objective of the study was to model mathematically the effect of oral communication rate on net recall. Findings of this study support the information processing view of learning, which says that the information input to short-term memory (STM), less information is coded to long-term memory due to rapid overloading of STM and more information is lost without being processed. The study was successful in modeling the communication rate and adding a coefficient representing communication rate to Anderson's equation.

This article presents a study which focused on the effectiveness of an introductory science course on force in reducing misconceptions on force. In the first lesson, an inventory is made of student ideas on force by students answering written questions on forces acting on objects in various situations. In the second lesson, students are involved in practical activities. In the third lesson, the teacher continues to collect opinions about forces in class through worksheets. The lessons were found to be effective in changing student ideas toward scientifically correct conceptions in regard to forces in rest situations and frictional forces.

This article investigates the use of concept mapping in college autotutorial biology students over a three instructional unit exposure, as well as, the student attitudes toward concept mapping. The study shows that concept mapping appeared to enhance clarity of learning as supported by two error analyses and student claims. Further, mapping also seemed to enhance integration and retention of knowledge as supported by analysis of cross links, a comparison of student maps with initial and post interviews, and student claims. In addition, this study provides some evidence that meaningful learning enhanced usability of knowledge.

The article discusses the research on the use of cluster analysis in categorization of physics problems. Sufficient details are included to enable the reader to use and adapt cluster analysis in problem-solving research dealing with categorization. The problem-solving process includes the formation of an internal representation of the external environment. This internal representation provides the framework within which the problem is to be solved. The problem solver operates on the representation rather than the statement of the problem.