Developed in response to deficiencies in verbal and quantitative skills demonstrated by students entering New Jersey colleges and taking the New Jersey Basic Skills Placement Test, this overview is designed to help interested educators orient themselves to the important and rapidly growing field of thinking skills instruction. The Task Force on…

A technique to teach cognitive skills to directly facilitate abstract and rational thinking is described. Based on George Kelly's theory of personal constructs, his Role Construct Repertory Test has students construe similarities and differences among important course concepts rather than provide individual definitions or examples of those…

Student problem-solving behaviors are analyzed using a four-dimensional framework with related detrimental factors identified for each dimension. General approaches and specific techniques developed to address negative factors are reviewed. Examined are means of developing the components of problem-solving teaching. (KR)

The goal of this paper is to relate liberation and the teaching of thinking. By looking at the great liberators throughout history, teachers can learn about their own craft. The goal of teaching thinking ought to be to develop individuals who can think for themselves. Such people have some measure of control over the meaning they make of their…

Argues that genuine critical thinking requires the recognition of the evolutionary nature of knowledge. Discusses the Perry scheme of nine stages of cognitive development and the Nelson variant of Perry's stages. Discusses teaching methods that are based on this approach and provides suggestions for further research. (CFR)

Investigated is the extent to which students' nonscientific beliefs change by comparing before and after instruction as a function of students' reasoning skill. Nonscientific beliefs discussed include special creation, orthogenesis, the soul, nonreductionism, vitalism, teleology, and nonemergentism. (KR)

A major focus in all areas of education today is the impact of education on students' ability to use higher order thinking skills. Understanding and improving the knowledge, cognitive abilities, and dispositions that guide, organize, and form effective action in the workplace, home, and community are significant problems for vocational education.…

This practicum was designed to incorporate critical thinking skills instruction and practice into a fourth-grade curriculum to increase fourth-grade students' ability to recognize and apply critical thinking strategies to appropriate situations. This program concentrated on the increasing of six critical thinking skills: classification, sequence…

Investigated is whether children would spontaneously model problems with superfluous information and whether their modeling would facilitate problem solving. Included are the addition/subtraction story problems used in this study, introduction, method, results, discussion, and conclusions. (KR)

Critical pedagogy, an ideology which opposes education as domination, views knowledge and learning as constructed by the student and teacher together. Its goal is personal and social emancipation and empowerment. The purposes of this paper are to (1) indicate problems in science education which can be addressed by teaching science from a critical,…

Asserts that the development of abstract knowledge and critical thinking skills has been extolled as a primary goal of education. Reviews research in problem solving and other educational endeavors. Maintains that learning abstract solution principles is enhanced when instruction is accompanied by examples illustrating those principles. (ACM)

Identifies concepts and findings in cognitive psychology and cooperative learning relevant to teaching and learning higher cognitive skills. Derives implications from research to use as criteria for evaluating history and social science instruction programs. Critiques three models for teaching intellectual skills in the social studies curriculum.…

Sex differences on Perry's stages of epistemological development were investigated in a study of 100 freshmen (50 men and 50 women) at a large midwestern university. A semi-structured interview probed six domains related to Perry's theory, including the role of the learner, instructor, and peers in the learning situation, the question of…

Discussed is whether, and to what extent, science teachers critically and spontaneously attend to the logical structure of situations, and whether they need prompting, or completely fail to do so. The relationship between the results of this study and science teachers' pre- and in-service education is discussed. (Author/KR)

This paper examines problems involved in designing an integrated system to teach and assess critical thinking skills in the classroom, and describes the Monitor Achievement in Pittsburgh (MAP) Critical Thinking Project, an attempt to draw upon research from diverse disciplines in developing an effective pilot project in the Pittsburgh public…