This study investigated the mental representations of student and professional engineers while they solved an engineering design problem. The intent was to gain a deeper insight into the differences that exist in the cognitive processes of engineering students and professional engineers as they use mental representations (i.e., propositions,…

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to examine the research literature on decision making and identify and develop a set of heuristics that work for school decision makers. Design/methodology/approach: This analysis is a synthesis of the research on decision-making heuristics that work. Findings: A set of nine rules for swift and smart decision…

Radical constructivists advocate discovery-based pedagogical regimes that enable students to incrementally and continuously adapt their cognitive structures to the instrumented cultural environment. Some sociocultural theorists, however, maintain that learning implies discontinuity in conceptual development, because novices must appropriate expert…

How do people select among different strategies to accomplish a given task? Across disciplines, the strategy selection problem represents a major challenge. We propose a quantitative model that predicts how selection emerges through the interplay among strategies, cognitive capacities, and the environment. This interplay carves out for each…

A large body of research demonstrates the incredible power of initial conceptions, scripts, and stereotypes that result from our naive theories. Prior knowledge compatible with information introduced by instructors enhances encoding and retrieval, but hinders learning when in conflict with it. Theories and facts contradicting existing beliefs are…

A curriculum is a knowledge structure outlining what is to be learned in what order. The Australian curriculum for English emphasises creation of a "coherent" and "cumulative" "body of knowledge about how the English language works", with learning that is "portable and applicable to new settings across the school…

This brief paper argues that structural analysis--an extended form of cognitive task analysis--demonstrates that both domain dependent and domain independent knowledge can be derived from specific content domains. It is noted that the major difference between the two is that lower order rules (specific knowledge) are derived directly from specific…

The prominent cognitive theories of probability judgment were primarily developed to explain cognitive biases rather than to account for the cognitive processes in probability judgment. In this article the authors compare 3 major theories of the processes and representations in probability judgment: the representativeness heuristic, implemented as…

Isolates domain-general decision-making (DM) processes in their specific instantiations in adult second-language acquisition (SLA). Some impediments to success in SLA may be artifacts of mature (adult) DM procedures. (Contains 29 references.) (JP)

Human resource development (HRD) can be seen as both a professional field and an organizational function; the I-A framework introduced in this article is a heuristic that enables us to understand HRD from both of these perspectives. Although scholars have presented frameworks for understanding the underlying theories, philosophies, and meanings of…

Chemists have bemoaned for years their students' inability to solve problems in introductory chemistry courses. However, at least part of this inability must be attributed to the fact that chemists have historically tried to teach their students to solve problems by doing nothing more than working examples. In recent years, chemists have begun to…

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 paper briefly reviews research on tasks in knowledge-rich domains including developmental studies, work in artificial intelligence, studies of expert/novice problem solving, and information processing analysis of aptitude test tasks that have provided increased understanding of the nature of expertise. Particularly evident is the finding that…

Newell and Simon's new theory of thinking is summarized and some educational implications developed. The enaction theory implies that thinking is a skill and should be taught like other skills, by teaching methods of how to perform it. The traditional theory of thinking and its influence are briefly discussed. (Author/MH)

Proposes that there is a universal method for all realms of knowledge. Reviews Descartes's definition of the universal method, the engineering definition, and the philosophical basis for the universal method. Contends that the engineering method best represents the universal method. (ML)