The Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded in 2002 for work on judgment and decision-making tasks that are the operational measures of rational thought in cognitive science. Because assessments of intelligence (and similar tests of cognitive ability) are taken to be the quintessence of good thinking, it might be thought that such measures would…

The Woodcock-Johnson-Fourth edition (WJ IV; Schrank, McGrew, & Mather, 2014a) and the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Fifth edition (WISC-V; Wechsler, 2014) are two of the major tests of cognitive abilities used in school psychology. The complete WJ IV battery includes the Woodcock-Johnson IV Tests of Cognitive Abilities (Schrank,…

The current paper discusses ambiguities in critical thinking assessment. The paper first reviews the components of critical thinking. It then discusses the features and issues of commonly used critical thinking tests and to what extend they are made compatible to the conceptualization of critical thinking. The paper argues that critical thinking…

Early differences in cognitive motivation (quest for knowledge) may differentiate gifted from nongifted children. Situation-specific and activity-oriented measures of cognitive motivation are described, and evidence is presented showing the effectiveness of a measurement of reaction to congruent and incongruent figures in the identification of…

Discusses the concept of metalinguistic awareness and describes the administration of the Test of Metalinguistic Ability (TAM) to 300 Italian elementary school children. (34 references) (CFM)

The method presented provides a systematic approach for communicating information about interrelationships between concepts taught in a psychology course. Students who did not receive the information through traditional instructional methods received enhanced scores on tests of structural understanding. Five references are listed. (MER)

Low-frequency words produce more hits and fewer false alarms than high-frequency words in a recognition task. The low-frequency hit rate advantage has sometimes been attributed to processes that operate during the recognition test (e.g., L. M. Reder et al., 2000). When tasks other than recognition, such as recall, cued recall, or associative…

This is an exploratory study comparing the mathematical cognitive structure of a group of junior high students educated in the United States with that of a group of students recently arrived from Hong Kong. The word association technique was employed to retrieve the mathematical cognitive structures from both groups of students. The word…

This paper examines the nature of human abilities in light of recent advances in information-processing and discusses implications of these developments for cognitive assessment of children. (CJ)

Discusses the development, administration, and evaluation of the Test of Metalinguistic Ability (TAM). Developed at the University of Rome, the TAM consists of 96 items divided into 6 parts: comprehension, synonyms, acceptability, ambiguity, grammatical function, and phonemic segmentation. (CFM)

Cognitive style mapping enables adult basic education (ABE) teachers to more readily identify a student's cognitive styles, or preferred way of acquiring information, as well as the specific areas where improvement is needed. The procedure prescribes techniques and resources for enhancing both academic skills and interpersonal relationships. The…

Three developments over the past 15 years--our understanding of cognition, new techniques in technical psychometrics, and the computer explosion--form the basis for a proposal for new intelligence tests. These developments are reviewed, and both leaps and steps in intellectual assessment are proposed. (Author/RD)

The author describes activities he uses with secondary school science students to learn about their reasoning. (Author/SA)

The state of Connecticut has introduced a fourth-grade mastery test that assesses thinking skills. The test was developed cooperatively by the state's Department of Education, a testing corporation, and several cognitive psychologists; several alternative models of thinking were synthesized to produce a theoretical foundation for the test. (MCG)

The British Ability Scales (BAS), published in 1979 (after a national standardization on a representative sample of British children), were revised and republished in January 1983. The BAS is an individually administered cognitive test battery for children aged between 3 and 17 years. It has considerable breadth of test content and provides a…