Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1980. The research reported here was carried out with the dual motives of exploring a hypothesis concerning the long term cognitive consequences of education and of attempting to adapt and standardize a Soviet clinical procedure for diagnosing retardation for use as an empirical method. The Soviet procedure, based on Vygotsky's (1978) theory of a zone of proximal development, offers a method of training which also allows for the assessment of speed of learning and distance of transfer. An adaptation of this procedure was followed in an attempt to train elderly subjects, who varied in the level of education they had received, to solve matrix problems similar to those found on Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices Test. The results indicated that the training did improve subjects' ability to solve matrix problems. Both speed of learning and flexibility were a function of prior educational level. The results are discussed in terms of possible reasons for the elderly's generally poor performance on cognitive measures, the long term cognitive consequences of education, and the possibilities for using the general procedure based on Vygotsky's theory in various areas, such as retardation research, in which training and transfer of training are central issues. U of I Only Restricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETDs