Children with mild mental retardation were matched by age and IQ and randomly assigned to receive either of two forms of instruction. Those who received learning set instruction on unidimensional classification and seriation improved on these precursors to concrete operations; those who received more conventional instruction did not. The improvement on classification and seriation was accompanied by improvement on measures of academic achievement, but there were no significant changes on a measure of psychometric intelligence. These results indicate the need for classroom techniques that produce mastery of, rather than improvement on, these simple forms of classification and seriation.
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