Effects of an Elementary Strategy on Operations of Exclusion.
Effects of an advance organizer (AO) lesson, containing high-order concepts relating to the law of capillary attraction and an elementary problem-solving strategy for determining causal relations, were evaluated for a sample of 80 urban six- and ten-year-old children. Significant sequential transfer effects were established from the AO lesson. Improved performance for experimental groups was maintained on a retention test and transferred to a second problem in that class of problems involving operations of exclusion. There was a marked tendency for performance to improve with age. The results suggest that acceptable solutions to problems requiring the operations of exclusion may be achieved without the use of complex propositional logic.