Examines the thinking and reasoning skills today's students need, reviewing promising approaches to understanding and improving these skills offered by cognitive psychologists and philosophers, evaluating the contributions of each approach, and suggesting how explanations offered by cognitive psychologists and criteria for evaluating students'…

Examines those theories of learning that have laid the groundwork for classroom approaches that encourage students to become active learners. Summarizes the National Science Education Standards (NCES) Teaching Standards B. (DDR)

Many children read mathematics word problems and directly translate them to arithmetic operations. More sophisticated problem solvers transform word problems into object-based or mental models. Subsequent solutions are often qualitatively different because these models differentially support cognitive processing. Based on a conception of problem…

This study reports on a multi-year effort to create and evaluate cognitive-based curricular materials for secondary school science classrooms. A team of secondary teachers, educational researchers, and academic biomedical engineers developed a series of curriculum units that are based in biomedical engineering for secondary level students in…

Mathematical creativity ensures the growth of mathematics as a whole. However, the source of this growth, the creativity of the mathematician, is a relatively unexplored area in mathematics and mathematics education. In order to investigate how mathematicians create mathematics, a qualitative study involving five creative mathematicians was…

How can it be explained that, aside from inter-individual differences, pupils in certain classes are more responsive than others to the formal aspects of a problem that has been set? The author puts forward the hypothesis that teachers differ in their ability to operate relevant variations in the conception of problems. The differences in…

Empathy has been suggested to facilitate effective collaborative problem solving in children. The current study adapted the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI, Davis, 1980), a well-validated empathy measure for adults, for use with children aged 8 and 9 years. Four hundred and thirteen school children aged between 7;11 and 9;11 years completed…

We examined the relationship between parents' behaviour and children's use of simple arithmetic strategies while playing a board game in contrast to solving arithmetic problems. In a microgenetic study spanning 3 weeks, 5-year-old children who were just beginning kindergarten played a modified game of "Chutes and Ladders" with one of…

Students frequently misconceive the process of problem-solving, expecting the linear process required for solving an exercise, rather than the convoluted search process required to solve a genuine problem. In this paper we present an activity designed to foster in students realization and appreciation of the nature of the problem-solving process,…

The overall intention of this project was to enhance awareness, for those involved with persons on the autism spectrum, of cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) strategies for treating persons with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The project involved a literature review on autism and the use of CBT strategies for people with autism spectrum disorders…

As a person learns, his problem solving ability improves and one reason for this is the increased acquisition of "macro-rules" which make problem solving more efficient. An intelligent computer assisted learning (ICAI) system is being developed which automatically acquires the useful knowledge from the domain experts; as experts give the learning…

Reuven Feuerstein's theory of Mediated Learning Experience was developed to explain individuals' different propensities for learning by linking those differences to an individual's exposure--through specific experiences--to his or her own culture, irrespective of its nature or level of conceptualization, technology, or institutionalized education.…

This study examines executive function and its relationship to attention dysfunction and working memory. It attempts to document the manifestations of executive function problems in school-related extended processing tasks, such as verbal problem-solving in math and reading of extended passages. Subjects (in grades 1-12) included 49 children with…

Previous research has cast doubt on children's ability to use specified evidence when making causal inferences, or, indeed, to differentiate between the specified evidence and their own preconceptions, or "prior theories." The present study continues previous work by distinguishing between children's reasoning in conditions where…

Various researchers have associated meaningful problem solving with methods guided directly by a conceptual knowledge base. By contast, a meaningless solving course, or sequence of operations, is essentially independent of the solver's conceptual understanding of the problem under consideration. This paper is the first to document a meaningless,…