Since the 1950's there has been a tremendous shift in the way language and language behavior is viewed. The shift is characterized as a general movement away from surface observation and analysis to attempts at the description and analysis of underlying linguistic forms. The interest in underlying linguistic forms has, in a rather natural way, led…

This study was designed to investigate the role of information storage and processing in the cognitive process of synthesis. In particular the effect of the timing of the presentation of two subordinate informational concepts on the cognitive process of synthesis was examined. 88 high school students in four sections of an introductory chemistry…

Mean response times and slope of response times were correlated with intelligence and achievement for 94 sixth-graders. Mean response time reliability was greater than that of slope, and correlated significantly with IQ and achievement. Speed of processing information generalized across experimental tasks and reliably indicated intellectual…

Tasks graded in terms of fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration of responses were administered to fourth graders in order to identify relationships between these measures of creativity, intelligence, and evaluation skills. With intelligence controlled, the relationship between creative thinking scores and evaluation ability was near…

Recent studies are examined for methodological adequacy in establishing dimensions of individual differences in information-processing abilities, and the theoretical problems involved in inferring psychological processes from individual difference dimensions. Methodological inadequacies include use of small samples, questionable procedures in…

In a synthesis of concepts from communication, comprehension, and socialization of intelligence, it is suggested that strategy adoption is dependent on the prior learning of the "situated meaning" for tasks requiring the use of memory strategies. In this view, strategy deficiencies in the mentally retarded arise from an impoverished learning…

Educators have shown great interest in teaching thinking in the last five years. This overview introduces thinking skills instruction as the theme of this issue of "Educational Leadership" and distinguishes three different approaches: teaching for thinking, teaching about thinking, and teaching of thinking. (TE)

The notion that thinking can be taught as a separate skill is a philosophical mistake. Teachers who are knowledgeable about their subject, who understand how it differs from other disciplines, and who can convey this to their students are already teaching thinking skills. (TE)

Measures of verbal intelligence and abstract reasoning were taken on a group of 31 college-aged and 32 elderly adults, together with mental-processing rates associated with choice reaction time, primary memory scanning, and lexical decoding. Group means showed that verbal IQ and lexical decoding were intact in the elderly subjects. (Author/LMO)

Intelligent relationships with people are among the goals for tomorrow's computers. Knowledge-based systems used and being developed to achieve these goals are discussed. Automatic learning, producing inferences, parallelism, program languages, friendly machines, computer vision, and biomodels are among the topics considered. (JN)

Eighty-two children (aged 4 through 6) were administered a Backward Digit Span test to measure M-space (mental capacity) and four conservation tasks: number, substance, continuous quantity and weight. (MS)

Total reaction time for dyslexic children was found to be longer than for normal children, suggesting that a modification of the study task might be useful for the early prediction of reading disability. (GS)