The challenge to the dominance of rationality in educational philosophy presented by John Dewey and Donald Schon is examined in this paper. The paper identifies basic assumptions of their perspective and explains concepts of reflective thinking, which include biography, context of uncertainty, and "not-yet." A model of reflective thought…

This book discusses the act of understanding in mathematics. The first chapter, "Understanding and Meaning," inquires into the various senses and uses of the word "understanding" in ordinary language and discusses the notion of meaning and relations between understanding and meaning. The second chapter, "Components and…

The high school journalism classroom provides a natural environment for learning in the context of a discipline's culture. This environment can provide the backdrop for moving the student toward the thinking and behavior of professional journalists. To understand this thinking, journalism teachers can turn to the research in cognitive psychology…

The act of communicating is not complete until the message is received and understood by the audience. This paper focuses on formulating messages for comprehensibility, in a discussion that is fundamentally applicable to all media. The ability to understand a verbovisual message depends on its readability, legibility, and its reading value.…

High-level visual processes make use of stored information, and are invoked during object identification, navigation, tracking, and visual mental imagery. The work presented in this document has resulted in a theory of the component "processing subsystems" used in high-level vision. This theory was developed by considering…

Some cognitive psychologists, who have tried to approach psychometric theories, say that the psychometric approach does not provide them with theories and methods with which they can deal with differential strategies. In this paper, a general latent trait model for differential strategies in cognitive processes is proposed which includes three…

Explores how thinking is organized, drawing upon the development of Darwin's thought from varying time perspectives. The struggle for coherence and identity in theory construction is seen as a dual process: that of an intutitive contact with the material and an abstract purposefulness and perspective. (Author/AM)

Many of the objectives in environmental continuing education are established using Bloom's and Krathwohl's taxonomies (values). This case study was undertaken to examine quantitatively the relationships among the conceptual categories within each domain. There were major concentrations of responses within each of the domains which helped establish…

The development and testing of QUEST, a model of human question answering, are reported. QUEST accounts for answers adults produce for different categories of open-class questions, identifying the information sources associated with the content words in questions. Each information source is organized in a conceptual graph structure. The model…

Even though reading is a complex process, cognitive psychologists generally agree that reading is an active thinking process. Four aspects of the interactive view of reading can help define this process: (1) readers use both what they know and information from the text to construct meaning; (2) readers elaborate what and how they read; (3) readers…

This study investigated how people reason about simple mechanical devices and physical systems, and how reasoning methods and understanding of a device evolve over a period of exposure. Twelve students attending the Teachers College at Columbia University (New York) participated in the first of two experiments; and 10 students attending the same…

J. P. Guilford's "structure of the intellect" provides a system that explains the intellectual abilities of students and identifies major types of productive thinking. A study was conducted to examine whether one of these types--divergent production, which focuses on responses of an individual's own creations--could be enhanced through…

A study examined how the diversity of media sources affected the structure of social issue cognitions. Interviews with 239 adults produced data concerning (1) the need for cognition, (2) issue domain salience, (3) source reliance, (4) source diversity, (5) source exposure, (6) issue domain differentiation, and (7) domain integration. Support was…

This paper describes the Structure-Mapping Engine (SME), a cognitive simulation program for studying human analogical processing. SME is based on Gentner's Structure-Mapping theory of analogy, and provides a "tool kit" for constructing matching algorithms consistent with this theory. This flexibility enhances cognitive simulation studies by…