This book examines research on creative thinking, both current and historical. It explores two dimensions of human thought (time and space) and two modes of thinking (conscious and unconscious) as well as both left and right brain functions and artistic and scientific creative activities. The book proposes a "Double Circulation" model of…

How do children learn math--and why do some children struggle with it? The answers are in "Number Sense and Number Nonsense," a straightforward, reader-friendly book for education professionals and an invaluable multidisciplinary resource for researchers. More than a first-ever research synthesis, this highly accessible book brings math…

This study investigated how 15 preadolescents and adolescents with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) performed on false belief tasks that included social inferencing of psychological states as well a logical inferencing of physical states. Unlike the control groups, the ASD group performed better on the social inferencing tasks and use of a prompt…

Proster Theory is a theory of learning which has been proposed by Leslie A. Hart (1975). The theory is based on the functions of the brain. Learning is seen as the formation of programs, which are simply sequences of instructions by which the brain directs the muscles, sense organs, or other portions of the neurological system. Programs which are…

This evaluation of thought disorders in 11 high functioning autistic young adults and older adolescents found poverty of speech, poor reality testing, perceptual distortions, and areas of cognitive slippage. In comparison with a schizophrenic reference group, autistic subjects demonstrated more poverty of speech and less illogic as well as similar…

This paper reviews the main research in the area of human reasoning and rational thinking to determine if man is either an "innately inefficient thinking machine" or if man's irrationality is "rooted in basic human nature," as Ellis (1976) suggests. The paper focuses on the work of two English theorists, Wason and…

Examines the relationship between development of logical processes required in deductive reasoning and their use by preschoolers, also considering possible explanations for children's deductive reasoning. The relationship of problem content to real-world knowledge and the sequence of presentation of problem types were found to affect the display…

Students (N=22) enrolled in secondary school biology were evaluated for their abilities to use: combinatorial logic; correlational reasoning; separation and control of variables; exclusion of irrelevant variables; proportional reasoning; and probabilistic reasoning. Each student responded individually to six Piagetian tasks designed to measure…

This set of papers was originally developed for a conference on Issues and Directions in Mathematics Problem Solving Research held at Indiana University in May 1981. The purpose is to contribute to the clear formulation of the key issues in mathematical problem-solving research by presenting the ideas of actively involved researchers. An…

This study hypothesized that subjects who display proportional responses on the Pouring Water Task have developed the ability to comprehend logical arguments of the form referred to as "reasoning to a contradiction," while subjects who display additive responses on the same task have not. To test this hypothesis, 100 additive and…

As comprehension failure results whenever readers are unable to infer missing causal connections, recent comprehension research has focused both on assessing the inferential complexity of texts and on investigating students' developing ability to infer causal relationships. Studies have demonstrated that texts rely on four types of causal…

Reports the use of a memory load-interference paradigm and the easy-to-hard paradigm as converging operations to study capacity limitations in five- to six-year-old's reasoning. Concludes that transitive inference ability in children is capacity limited. (HOD)

Investigates the relationship between class inclusion and reasoning in 56 Dutch Children between 6 and 14 years of age. Concludes that when the children failed to respond correctly to questions about the validity of syllogisms, they did so because they lacked sufficient understanding of the premises. (HOD)

Reports on two studies during which 6-, 8-, and 10-year-old children were interviewed about three different types of regularities or rules: social conventions, physical laws, and logical necessities. Shows that older children made more distinctions between social and nonsocial items than did younger children. (HOD)

Specific modes of formal reasoning and measurements of principled moral reasoning ability were obtained from 99 10th-grade students. Hierarchical relationships were found amoung variables with combinatorial and correlational reasoning accounting for 22 percent of the variance in principled moral reasoning. Theoretical and educational implications…