This Family and Practitioner Brief discusses how deaf children who have not had access to a complete language from birth often encounter unique challenges in developing academic language skills, particularly in the realm of inference-making.

In this paper, I apply the Multiple Documents Text-Based Relevance Assessment and Content Extraction (MD-TRACE) model, to describe the types of cognitive processes that students engage to critically reason about social issues, as they are portrayed through mass media. In addition to examining such processes, I further consider the extent to which…

The main aim of the present investigation was to examine conditional reasoning skills in college students whose educational past had emphasized verbatim learning. A successive independent-samples design was utilized to explore the effects of instruction that explicitly targeted critical thinking principles in either freshman students or…

Conflicting explanations and unrelated information in science classrooms increase cognitive load and decrease efficiency in learning. This reduced efficiency ultimately limits one's ability to solve reasoning problems in the science. In reasoning, it is the ability of students to sift through and identify critical pieces of information that is of…

The moral reasoning development of college freshmen was investigated over the course of a semester. Participants were tested at the beginning of the semester and at the end of the semester and were either in a course that required active engagement in critical thinking (e.g. perspective-taking, reflection) about social and political issues or in a…

Test results from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) reveal that Shanghai students performed less well in solving interactive problems (those that require uncovering necessary information) than in solving analytical problems (those having all information disclosed at the outset). Accordingly, this study investigates…

The study utilized a multi-method approach to explore the connection between critical thinking and epistemological beliefs in a specific problem-solving situation. Data drawn from a sample of ten third-year bioscience students were collected using a combination of a cognitive lab and a performance task from the Collegiate Learning Assessment…

This paper outlines a theoretical paradigm for distinguishing thinking, knowing and believing. A new taxonomy is presented for categorizing levels of knowing and outlines a structure of justification for each level. The paper discusses and explains the importance of such distinctions in decision making and thinking in general.

Humans appear to reason using two processing styles: System 1 processes that are quick, intuitive, and effortless and System 2 processes that are slow, analytical, and deliberate that occasionally correct the output of System 1. Four experiments suggest that System 2 processes are activated by metacognitive experiences of difficulty or disfluency…

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…

Examines Paul H. Hirst's concept of reason as implied in his theory of the forms of knowledge. Explains Hirst's view of the temporal nature of knowledge and analyzes his key concepts of objectivity, judgement, the given, and facts. (Author/DMM)

A method for stimulating thought processes and broadening the imaginative scope. (RB)

Advocates and teachers of critical thinking tend to deny that intuition and justification are logical, even though they assume that both processes are rational. However, it can be demonstrated that the relation between intuition and inference, between justification and explanation, is dialectical and complementary, so that there is no mystery as…

A theory of adult cognitive development which includes two post-formal operational stages is described. The paper is divided into three sections. The first section provides background for discussion of the theory. A case study in which various employees in a hypothetical organization react to a problem is provided. Examples of pre-logical,…

Despite the current emphasis on thinking skills and the resulting concentration on lists and taxonomies that do not succeed beyond research contexts, all reflective people know that critical thought relies not on applying mental steps but on simply trying to figure out what might be right or wrong. This depends on one basic cognitive act,…