Six children who were mentally retarded and ranged from six to eight years old were instructed on the Piagetian constructs of unidimensional classification and/or unidimensional seriation. The “Piaccel-eration” learning set technique, which employs concrete objects and a graded series of 160 problems, was used for the instruction. The children made substantial, statistically significant gains on classification and / or seriation after one semester of instruction. There were also significant gains in scores on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test and the Slosson Intelligence Test, the latter averaging 11.8 points. Individual differences were large. Changes in the IQ scores were linearly related to gains on seriation and to a combination of classification and seriation gains. The vocabulary improvement was independent of IQ gains and related only to seriation gains. This study supports the suggestions of other researchers that instruction on Piagetian constructs may lead to cognitive gains for children who are retarded.
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