This book on propositional reasoning is part of a series designed to assist beginning and experienced teachers in becoming regular evaluators of their own instruction. The book consists of two parts. The first part provides information on probabilistic, disjunctive, combinatorial, implicational, deductive, and proportional reasoning and on…

State policymakers' efforts to promote teaching for understanding and thinking in elementary schools were assessed. Data were obtained through interviews of directors of state departments of education nationwide, interviews of two or more curriculum specialists in seven states judged to be particularly active in promoting higher order outcomes,…

The Goldstein-Scheerer Tests of Abstract and Concrete Thinking are reviewed. This evaluative summary supplements several reviews in the Mental Measurements Yearbook series. The Goldstein-Scheerer tests are used by clinicians and researchers to distinguish normal individuals (those able to engage in two qualitatively different levels of cognitive…

Intended for teachers across grade levels and disciplines, this monograph reviews research on the development of critical thinking skills and introduces a series of these skills that can be incorporated into classroom teaching. Beginning with a definition of critical thinking, the monograph contains two main sections. The first section reviews…

Focusing on the role of language in learning, this paper discusses schemata and symbolic thinking that help students learn from unfamiliar experiences. The first part of the paper introduces the idea of symbolic thinking by comparing students encountering new ideas with convention-goers making their way around a new city. The section suggests that…

This report presents a rationale for development of an international perspective on the role of research in the improvement of science education in particular and education in general. Costa Rica, Trinidad and Tobago, Mexico and the United States are the participating countries. Topics discussed include: (1) goals and directions for science…

The purpose of this booklet is to explain examination registration procedures and to introduce the Psychometric Entrance Examination so that students will know what to expect, what types of questions they will be asked, and how they will be expected to answer. The aim of the examination is to evaluate a variety of cognitive abilities: verbal,…

The Conceptual Learning and Development (CLD) Model suggests four successive levels of concept learning: (1) concrete--recognizing an object which has been encountered previously; (2) identity--recognizing a known object when it appears in a different spatial, time, or sensory perspective; (3) classificatory--generalizing that two items are alike…

It is suggested that a reader's idea structure will affect processing of incoming information. Two aspects of the idea structure are further developed--the truth value aspect and the analytic level aspect. The idea structure can be characterized by ideas consisting of propositions which are considered to be more or less true or false (beliefs), or…

Developmental patterns in one mode of formal reasoning (probabilistic reasoning) were examined in this research study, specifically: (1) to determine if developmental patterns of probabilistic reasoning could be confirmed using a large, diverse sample of subjects, and if they could be similar despite variations in the complexity of the reasoning…

Hierarchically organized knowledge about actions has been postulated to explain planning in problem solving. Perdix, a simulation of problem solving in geometry with schematic planning knowledge, is described. Perdix' planning knowledge enables it to augment the problem space it is given by constructing auxiliary lines. The planning system also…

After reading a passage from a text which explained the deep and surface approaches to learning, ninety Swedish teenagers and adults with varying levels of formal education were asked to discuss their own learning in terms of this distinction. Surprisingly, sixty-one subjects considered both approaches applicable to their own learning. After…

Research conducted at the Institute of General and Pedagogical Psychology of Moscow, and based on the premise that the development of thought processes is a direct product of the social environment, is described. As a corollary to this premise, Piaget's view that the development of the thinking process occurs in orderly fashion is questioned.…

This study tested the hypothesis that children with weaker speech ability have greater difficulties in perception, powers of reasoning and spatial orientation than children with better speech ability, and assessed the value of Apgar scores as a predictive measure of later linguistic disorders. Subjects were 100 children born in 1970 who attended…

In behavioral science research, language has been increasingly seen to reflect the concepts that the child has acquired prior to, and hence independent of, the acquisition of language. Analyses based on this idea are confined largely to words that denote clear perceptual referents. Language, however, contains many terms that have no portrayable…