Background: Intellectual style, an encompassing term for such constructs as learning style, teaching style, teaching approach, and thinking style, refers to one's preferred way of processing information. For the past several decades, whether or not there is a need for a match between teachers' teaching styles and students' learning styles has been…

We consider how to differentiate instruction using a theory of thinking styles as a basis for differentiation. The article opens with a consideration of why styles are important. Then it considers some general characteristics of styles, presents the theory of mental self-government, considers issues of measurement, and presents data supporting the…

The triarchic theory posits that intelligence has analytical, creative, and practical aspects. Instructional and assessment methods should encourage and evaluate all three kinds of abilities, a balanced approach that can reach all students. (SK)

The triarchic theory of human cognition posits three types of cognitive skills: analytical, creative, and practical. Triarchic teaching means teaching to students' strengths and weaknesses. This article shows how the model can be successfully applied to improve schools' existing reading programs. (Contains 13 references.) (MLH)

Defining successful intelligence as ability to adapt to environment to accomplish goals leads to radical reconceptualization of "good student." A project testing high school students for four kinds of achievement (memory, analytical, creative, and practical) discovered that students placed in instructional sessions matching their ability…

Argues that the question of whether information representation and processing are domain-general or domain-specific is neither meaningful nor answerable. Researchers should be asking questions about ways in which representation and processing are domain-general and ways in which they are domain-specific. (RH)

The flexible use of the mind for mental self-governance accounts for a variety of thinking styles. Just as the functions of mental self-government resemble those of government branches (legislative, executive, and judicial), the forms of mental self-government have government analogues (monarchic, hierarchic, oligarchic, and anarchic). Teacher…

A style is a preferred way of using one's abilities. People vary their styles to suit different tasks and situations. According to mental government theory, we organize ourselves according to certain government types. There are 13 styles under 5 categories: functions, forms, levels, scope, and leanings. Students receive more favorable evaluations…

Three experiments are reported investigating experts' and laypersons' conceptions of intelligence. In the first experiment, persons studying in a college library, entering a supermarket, and waiting for trains in a railroad station were asked to list behaviors characteristic of either "intelligence,""academic intelligence,""everyday intelligence,"…

The field of styles presents three major controversial issues: styles as value-laden versus value-free, styles as traits versus states, and styles as different constructs versus similar constructs with different labels. We address these issues by proposing an integrative model of styles--the Threefold Model of Intellectual Styles--which divides…

This article offers four models of what may be going wrong in the transmission of thinking skills from textbooks and teachers to students. Sources of the problem are identified and possible solutions, alternatives, and strategies of "teaching for thinking" are described. (JL)

Though the most widely used "Intelligence" tests have changed little in the last half century, the author predicts a variety of new influences of future intelligence testing, ranging from the ways we conceptualize intelligence, to the manner in which we pose problems to assess it. (Author/JAZ)

Educators must teach and assess in ways that allow students to use their memorization, analytical, creative, and practical abilities. A Yale study of 199 high schoolers found that students whose instruction matched their abilities pattern performed significantly better than the others. Expanding the range of abilities tested expands the range of…

Describes the concept of cognitive styles and discusses why they are of interest to psychologists and educators. Describes motivations for theory and research on cognitive styles, and reviews some of the principal literature on cognitive style. A theory of mental self-government is presented as an approach to the study of cognitive style. (SLD)

The unified theory described in this paper characterizes human reasoning as an information processing system with a hierarchical sequence of components and subtheories that account for performance on successively narrower tasks. Both deductive and inductive theories are subsumed in the unified componential theory, including transitive chain theory…