This reproduces, for fun, a conversation between three professors at the University of Illinois, that originated at a dinner party over a couple of bottles of good red wine.

In this article, the author takes a look at how reflective and courageous practitioners show their critical and constructive thinking for handling the intellectual and interpersonal complexities of ethical analysis. The author also discusses six lessons practitioners need to learn.

When, if ever, should social studies teacher educators and K-12 teachers seek to inculcate specific values, attitudes, and beliefs in their students? To address this question, the author offers a case from his own practice as a social studies teacher educator, illustrating how he promoted critical and divergent thinking during the first half of…

Identified some experiences that lead to preschool children's transition from less to more systematic problem-solving strategies. Receiving encouragement to adopt more analytic attitudes and encountering problems with perceptually salient differences on a relevant dimension were the two types of experiences examined. (Author/DB)

The material contained in this annotated resource list is intended to provide information upon which decisions about teaching thinking can be made, not to recommend or point to a particular path. The sources are organized around four groups of questions frequently asked by those responsible for making such decisions: (1) What are the components of…

Provides a ready-to-use outline for an instructional unit on using analogies as a reading skill. (JT)

For 235 ninth-grade students, intercorrelations of Guilford's structure-of-intellect (SOI) tests and of three measures of critical thinking were factor analyzed. The study reveals the viability of using SOI constructs involving cognition and evaluation of semantic content as likely explanatory components of critical thinking. (Author/AL)

The domain specificity and generality of an important critical thinking skill was examined by administering nine reasoning and decision-making tasks to 125 adults. Performance across tasks displayed considerable domain specificity, but five tasks displayed moderate convergence. Performance on tasks that displayed domain generality was more…

The teaching of decision-making, problem-solving, and higher-order thinking skills is necessary to ensure adaptability to our world of accelerated change. Living skills in the technology and information age will include the understanding and application of higher level thinking skills, which will be the educational "basics" of tomorrow.…

Presents findings of a study of scientists on the Wason four-card selection task, finding little understanding of the effect of disconfirmatory data in assessing conditionals. Found performance influenced by problem content. Explains performance as memory-cueing plus reasoning-by-analogy. (JM)

Purpose of this study was to show the relationship of arithmetic reasoning, critical thinking, fluency of words, fluency of ideas, sensitivity to problems, and general intelligence to literal and critical reading of sixth and eighth grade pupils. (Author)

The paper's purpose is to clarify and develop some theoretical and practical implications of the concept of critical thinking, and the field of social studies is used as one example of the problem. The work of four leading critical theorists (Robert Ennis, Harvey Siegel, Michael Scriven, and R. S. Peters) is described and a distinction is made…

Provided is a list of the needs of gifted and talented children. Delineates the concomitant relationship with science instruction and the stages in the model that are instrumental in meeting these needs. (RT)

Discusses how environmental education (EE) can provide opportunities for development of higher order thinking skills such as learning critically and creatively, and learning to think in an integrated manner--in terms of identifying alternatives, using multiple sources, designing novel approaches, and identifying real and potential solutions.…

Tautologies in student essays, arguments that most commonly assume the truth or self-evidence of themselves without relationship to something other than themselves, can be identified whenever an essay contains a series of nonsuccessive, noncumulative discourse units. Three kinds of tautologies in student papers are tautologies of redundancy,…