Teaching to support students' sense-making is challenging. It requires continuous, context-dependent decision-making about which student ideas to pursue, when, how, and why. This paper presents a single case study of an experienced teacher, Nadine, as an illustrative case in order to provide a rich description of this teacher's decisional…

Therapeutic reasoning is when the purpose, task, or goal for engaging in reasoning is to determine the patient's management plan. As the field's understanding of the process of therapeutic reasoning is less well understood, we focused on studies that collected data on the process of therapeutic reasoning. To synthesize previous studies of…

Teachers exercising reflexivity through their internal conversations is one of the most important factors in the process of curriculum change. Drawing from Margaret Archer's theory, this research explores teachers' internal conversations in their own descriptions about a range of matters related to curriculum making. Eight secondary school…

Students' capacity for making evaluative judgements of their own work is widely acknowledged as central to their learning within programmes as well as being vital to their subsequent professional practice. In higher education literature, the act of evaluative judgement is usually portrayed as a process of deliberative, analytical reasoning…

We propose two contrasting types of student decision-making based on social and cognitive psychology models of separate mental processes for problem solving. Informal decision-making uses intuitive reasoning and is subject to cognitive biases, whereas formal decision-making uses effortful, logical reasoning. We explored indicators of students'…

The purpose of this paper is to outline some new developments in a mature research program that sees administrative theory as cohering with natural science and uses a coherence theory of epistemic justification to shape the content and structure of administrative theory. Three main developments are discussed. First, the paper shows how to deal…

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…

With the emergence of a wealth of research-based information in the field of educational neuroscience, educators are now able to make more evidence-based decisions in the important area of curriculum design and construction. By viewing from the perspective of educational neuroscience, we can give a more meaningful and lasting purpose of leading to…

This article is concerned with how computer science, and more exactly computational complexity theory, can inform cognitive science. In particular, we suggest factors to be taken into account when investigating how people deal with computational hardness. This discussion will address the two upper levels of Marr's Level Theory: the computational…

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.

In November 2008 at Purdue University, the 2nd Workshop on Human Problem Solving was held. This workshop, which was a natural continuation of the first workshop devoted almost exclusively to optimization problems, addressed a wider range of topics that reflect the scope of the "Journal of Problem Solving." The workshop was attended by 35…

Challenges studies supporting Kohlberg's claim of invariance in the development of moral judgment which maintain that subjects' preferred responses to moral dilemmas are based on higher stages of thinking. Findings indicate language rather than levels of thinking is a significant factor in subjects' response preferences. (CM)

Training sessions for the development of active critical thinking skills with the aim of improving the quality of student decision making prepares them for a future in a rapidly changing society. (JD)

Similarity underlies fundamental cognitive capabilities such as memory, categorization, decision making, problem solving, and reasoning. Although recent approaches to similarity appreciate the structure of mental representations, they differ in the processes posited to operate over these representations. We present an experiment that…

This study investigated several questions generated by cueing system research. The cueing system is perceived as a means of directing our categorizing behaviors in the processing and recall of information. Experiments involved a comparison of categorical cueing systems on a given task in relation to two control areas: (1) subjects using a free…