The purpose of this study was to investigate gender‐related differences in the relationship between the development of formal reasoning skills and learning interests during the early adolescent stage. For this purpose, 249 students, from seventh to ninth grade, were assessed for their level of mastery of formal reasoning skills by a test based on videotaped simple experiments. Learning interests were assessed by a written response to an open question. Results showed that adolescent boys develop patterns of formal reasoning before their girl classmates. In addition, boys tend to prefer science and technology subjects, while girls tend to prefer language, social studies, and humanities. Analysis of interactions showed that boys' tendency toward science and technology is positively correlated to their age and development of formal reasoning, while girls' tendency to the above subjects is positively related to their development of formal reasoning capacity, but inversely related to their age. Possible explanations to the above‐described findings and suggestions for instructional modes that may increase girls' interest in science and technology are discussed.
A systematic study of children's ideas on motion of macroscopic objects was camed out with the participation of 631 subjects in Grades 2-12 (ages 7-8 through [17][18]). An openended, four-part questionnaire was administered to the subjects. The responses were categorized according to the level of sophistication of the answer. The results were analyzed using a mathematical model that was first applied to the development of Piagetian stages (Eckstein & Shemesh, 1992, in press). For three of the questions, the responses change as the children mature, and it appears that the children pass through distinct, successive stages with respect to their conceptual understanding of these questions. The mathematical model predicts that the proportion of subjects at each stage is a linear combination of decreasing exponentials. The model fits the experimental data well. Characteristic times for transition between stages were calculated. If teaching strategies to overcome misconceptions are to be effective, then they must be appropriate to the particular misconception prevalent at each stage.
A theoretical model of cognitive development is applied to the study of the acquisition of formal operational schemata by adolescents. The model predicts that the proportion of adolescents who have not yet acquired the ability to perform a a specific Piagetian-like task is an exponentially decreasing function of age. The model has been used to analyze the data of two large-scale studies performed in the United States and in Israel. The functional dependence upon age was found to be the same in both countries for tasks which are used to assess the following formal operations: proportional reasoning, probabilistic reasoning, correlations, and combinatorial analysis. Different functional dependence was found for tasks assessing conservation, control of variables, and propositional logic. These results give support to the "unity" hypothesis of cognitive development, that is, the hypothesis that the various schemata of formal thought appear simultaneously.In this article we propose a theoretical model of cognitive development and apply this model to the study of the acquisition of formal-operational schemata by adolescents. In this model, the independent variable is t ,
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