Originally published in 1976, the authors present a theory of cognitive development based upon an information-processing approach. This approach leads to the presentation of precise models of performance on a number of tasks derived from a set of critical quantitative concepts: elementary quantification, number concepts, conservation and transitivity. These models encompass both early and late developmental stages, and a process model of the developmental mechanism itself is outlined. Here is one of the first attempts to apply the information-processing view of cognitive psychology to developmental issues raised by empirical work in the Piagetian tradition. It includes an extensive analysis of the processing demands of several of the classic tasks and describes the development of a system capable of performing a wide range of other tasks, including the ability to be self-modifying. It provides an introduction to general concepts and detailed properties of cognitive models stated as production systems. It will be most valuable for students in cognitive development and related courses in developmental, cognitive, and educational psychology, as well as computer science.

David Klahr suggests that we now know enough about cognition--and hence about everyday thinking--to advance our understanding of scientific thinking.

We described the former group as searching an hypothesis space, and the latter as searching an experiment space. In a second study with 10 adults, we investigated how subjects search the hypothesis space by instructing them to state all the hypotheses that they could think of prior to conducting any experiments. Following this phase, subjects were then allowed to conduct experiments. Subjects who could not think of the correct rule in the hypothesis generation phase discovered the correct rule only by generalizing from the results of experiments in the experimental phase.

A primary instructional objective of most early science programs is to foster children's scientific curiosity and question-asking skills (Jirout & Klahr, 2011). However, little is known about the relationship between curiosity, question-asking behavior, and general inquiry skills. While curiosity and question asking are invariably mentioned in national and state standards and in most preschool science curricula, they are rarely assessed (National Research Council, 1996; Worth, 2010). Instead, science assessments typically focus on domain-specific content, rather than on domain-general skills like question-asking. In this paper, the authors describe their work investigating the relationship between pre-school children's curiosity and question asking, and assess the effectiveness of training them to ask different types of questions. The authors investigate three research questions in this paper: (1) What is the relationship between curiosity and children's question asking ability?; (2) Can children learn to ask both identification and understanding questions through explicit training, and/or practice, and does this training transfer to other inquiry skills?; and (3) Does curiosity influence the effectiveness of training and practice on children's question asking ability? Participants were 75 students recruited from kindergarten and first grade classes at two suburban charter schools, and 31 preschool children from four suburban daycare centers. Participants' ethnic distribution was representative of the local population, and genders were equally represented. Positive relationships between children's curiosity and the range of question asking abilities measured were observed, suggesting that more curious children ask more questions, are better able to use questions to solve simple problems, and are better at discriminating between helpful and not helpful questions. Preliminary analyses suggest that children can benefit differently on these tasks with different training protocols and that training in specific skills can transfer to other related skills, and that curiosity level might influence the effectiveness of the interventions. Final analyses will be conducted after data collection is complete. There were limitations in using the same measures across age group, because older children were more likely to test-out of the study at pretest. Additionally, forms of some measures differed in difficulty level and could not be counterbalanced between pretest and posttests, so it is not possible to look at gain on those measures although they do provide pretest ability and posttest ability in order to investigate group differences. This study describes new approaches of looking at the domain general inquiry skills curiosity and question asking, which--despite being present in science standards and curricula goals--are often overlooked in assessments. Preliminary results suggest effective methods of developing children's question asking abilities, as well as for individualizing instruction for children differing in curiosity level. (Contains 1 table and 2 figures.).

This chapter reviews the history and current status of information-processing approaches to cognitive development. Because the approach is so pervasive, it is useful to characterize research in terms of distinctive features, and to organize the features according to whether they are soft-core or hard-core aspects of the information processing approach. Each of these features is illustrated by example, and the hard-core approach is expanded into a detailed analysis of self-modifying production systems and their potential for formulating theories of cognitive development. Keywords: Information processing; Cognitive development; Self modification; Production system. (SDW).