Well-conducted, theory-guided empirical research into school administration is important, but will never by itself provide ultimate answers to questions of human action, choice, and value. This paper describes the theoretical framework studies conducted by the Cognitive Approaches to School Leadership (CASL) Project. The paper explains central…

This brief paper presents a summary of a study which examined the developmental progression of categorization and its relationship to language development in 12 adults with severe to profound mental retardation and with less than 100 words of expressive language (including manual signs). Subjects were asked to sort physically eight miniature…

The goal of this paper is to demonstrate how Constructivism in education has failed to address criticisms by re-directing or misdirecting the focus of the debate over whether or not Constructivism is able to give support to a viable theory of instruction. In response, support is given to Constructivism by drawing on rational, moral, and…

Asserting that the ability to compare is basic to any cognitive process, this paper draws on Reuven Feuerstein's theory of mediated learning experience to guide teachers in encouraging the development of young students' spontaneous comparative abilities. Teachers are to provide students with concepts, labels, operations, and relationships to…

Goal theory has become one of the most prominent perspectives in the study of academic motivation. Prior studies have found conflicting results regarding the relationship of goal orientation to cognitive engagement, academic achievement, and ability perceptions. Two hundred thirty-nine students from a large state university participated in this…

A glance at any newspaper shows that graphs play an important part in presenting data to the public. It appears self-evident that children need to develop "graphical literacy" as part of their mathematics education. As part of a series of mathematically orientated science activities in the Practical Mechanics in Primary Mathematics project, 102…

This book attempts to review and extend current knowledge and perspectives on scientific problem solving by utilizing the framework of cognitive science. While the focus of the monograph is toward problem solving, its ultimate goal is the improvement of science teaching. Twelve chapters address problem solving in a variety of science content…

The fragmentation of strategies that distinguishes the more successful elementary grade students from those least successful has been documented previously. This study investigated whether this phenomenon of divergence and fragmentation of strategies would occur among undergraduate students enrolled in a remedial algebra course. Twenty-six…

An adaptation technique of multimodal interfaces based on a cognitive modeling of users is presented in this paper. The adaptation process tries to select a combination of modalities that best fits the cognitive profile of each user. This profile contains indicators of cognitive abilities and styles. This paper focuses on output modalities and…

This paper describes a models and modeling framework that has been applied to various areas in teaching, learning and problem solving. It examines the implications of that framework on metacognition and higher order thinking during everyday problem-solving situations that required teams of students to produce complex solutions in approximately 1-2…

This toolkit contains a set of professional development materials whose goal is to help mathematics teachers in grades 6-10 learn to identify, describe, and foster algebraic thinking in their students. A core belief underlying the Toolkit is that good mathematics teaching begins with understanding how mathematics is learned, so these materials…

School psychologists are often asked to make significant decisions about students, but there has been a lack of research on how psychologists make such decisions. Obtaining the objective that school psychologists make sound decisions is an important goal, which involves training in how to minimize the adverse impact of predictable biases in human…

Noting current brain development research, this book offers simple, straightforward ways to boost children's brain power with active exploration, repetition, sensory exploration, laughter, and more. The chapters describe how and why the brain develops and explain how parents can give their children the best foundation for future learning.…

The motivational effects of feedback types consisting of the same evaluative components, but differing in the informative components, were studied with 156 German undergraduates in a computer-based learning experiment. A concept-formation task was the learning material. Three feedback conditions were designed: (1) knowledge about result (low…

This study used the "double easy-to-hard" paradigm to examine the hypothesis that the class inclusion (CI) task should be equivalent in relational complexity to the transitive inference (TI) problem. Participating in the study were 64 girls and 50 boys, with a mean age of 8 years, 6 months. Stimuli for easy versions of the tasks were…