Although prominent theories in college student development cover a breadth of developmental aspects and draw from various fields of study, the literature lacks a developmental theory that explains the neurological processes that occur during student development. This literature review uses Neuro-semantic Language Learning Theory (Arwood, 1983;…

Marck Prensky, an authority on teaching and learning especially with the aid of Information and Communication Technologies, has referred to 21st century children born after 1980 as "Digital Natives". This paper reviews literature of leaders in the field to shed some light on theoretical perspectives of how Digital Natives learn and how…

Aging diversity in organizations creates potential challenges, particularly for knowledge management, skills update and skills obsolescence. Intergenerational learning (IGL) involves knowledge building, innovation and knowledge transfer between generations within an organization (Ropes 2011). Serious games refer to the use of computer games in…

The purpose of this literature review was to study some of the most famous works in teaching thinking skills. Teaching thinking is an arguable issue in the UAE. Some teachers are in favour of teaching thinking skills implicitly while others support the view that students have to learn thinking skills explicitly. The study aimed at answering two…

Many recent articles, research papers, and conference presentations about Lev Vygotsky's zone of proximal development (ZPD) emphasize the "extended" version of the ZPD that reflects human emotions and desires. In this essay, Michael G. Levykh expands on the extant literature on the ZPD through developing several new ideas. First, he maintains that…

Replies to "Structures, Doctrines, and Polemical Ghosts," by Carl Bereiter. Holds that Bereiter's proposal, which claims that Piagetian stages are a prerequisite to more specific cognitive processes, violates a basic assumption of stage-developmental views. (Author/GC)

It has been well established that all learning is developmental, and involves reorganization and continual reconstruction of complex structures that begin to develop at an early age. This theory can best be applied to instructional practice if cognitive development is conceptualized as a hierarchical process rather than as a continuum. (Author/GC)

Malcolm Knowles laments the paucity of "thinking, investigating, and writing about adult learning" in the opening sentence of his theoretical framework of "Andragogy" (1998, p. 35). Knowles' central argument is that we learn differently as adults from how we learn as children, so we should tailor adult education accordingly. Knowles highlighted…

Several epistemic formulations have been advanced to explain cognitive development. Many writers have divided the field of psychology into three basic underlying models: the mechanistic, organismic, and dialectic models. An examination of epistemic positions reveals five broadly defined positions on how behavior develops within a given organism.…

In his new book, Reuven Feuerstein explains the program he has developed to improve human ability to learn and to solve problems. (Author/MLF)

The persistence of the constructivist agenda within learning and developmental theory suggests that underneath the seemingly disparate views of Piagetian, socioculturalist, and ecological perspectives lie some unifying concepts that find their mutual expression in constructivism. The paper contends that semiotics provides the conceptual means to…

Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development and David Ausubel's assimilation theory of learning are explicated and selected research involving both theories is reviewed in this paper. The two theories are compared on selected dimensions to demonstrate that they are compatible and that, in conjunction with one another, they form a strong…

This paper discusses the nature of cognitive research and its implications for learning and teaching science. In addition to needing adequate financial support, active involvement of scientists and educators, and education of teachers, two other factors should loom large in the development of new instructional materials in science and in the…

Discusses Jean Piaget's information-processing model of cognitive development. (FL)

An examination of how new knowledge is acquired reveals that knowledge is organized in global conceptual constructs called schemata, and that the process of knowledge acquisition can be conceptualized as the articulation and restructuring of these schemata. Assuming that a schema is a generative structure with implications beyond what is…