Scientific argumentation skills are a key component of science learning practices needed by students in the 21st century. Where the essence of scientific argumentation is to support the argument with evidence and reasoning and then refute the claims and evidence of the opponent's argument. Supporting arguments with evidence and reasoning can be…

Appeals to reform science education by policy makers are not new phenomena. To be sure, while science reform efforts have been ongoing occurrences for nearly six decades, perpetual educational reform efforts as a whole have been evolving and gaining momentum in number for more than a century. The general motivation for continual reform appears to…

As teachers of political theory, our goal is not merely to help students understand the abstract reasoning behind key ideas and texts of our discipline. We also wish to convey the historical contexts that informed these ideas and texts, including the political aims of their authors. But the traditional lecture-and-discussion approach tends to…

Discusses the level of knowledge, understanding, and ability relative to mathematics for the college graduate in the 21st century. Focuses on mathematical literacy and abstraction such as the definition of abstraction, difficulties in addressing abstraction, and one approach to helping students learn to address abstraction. (Contains 12…

This paper analyzes how philosophy enters into inquiry in teacher education, in writings by both philosophers and nonphilosophers. Examples illustrate philosophical activities (such as conceptual and logical analysis, positing and explaining distinctions, evoking shared ideas and values), as well as showing that philosophy plays an important part…

Suggests having students write short summaries using the principles of the journalistic news "lead" to help them sharpen their abstraction skills. Includes samples of data blocks from which students would compose their summaries, kernel sentences from the samples, "kernel" kernel sentences, first draft summaries, and 30-word…

Creativity can be distinguished from intelligence, but there is no consensus on how the recognized stages of the creative act can be taught. The steps to rational thinking can and should be intentionally taught and rationality may prepare a base for unexpected creative insights. (DB)

In teaching symbolic logic to students not majoring in mathematics, one can appeal to simple arithmetic examples, set theory examples, and the use of conjunction and disjunction as aids in presenting the conditional. (SD)

The article describes a study to determine how instruction on the distinction between two theoretical ideas will affect the intake, interpretation, and recall of new information related to but different from the first. (Author/SB)

Builds on the results of earlier research that investigated principles that facilitate higher levels of learning in Internet-based distance learning university courses. Explores how these can be applied to Internet-based distance learning environments, using results of questionnaires from experts and scholars that considered complex abstracted…

Conventional instruction in critical thinking may ignore the creative and intuitive functions of rationality, thereby encouraging a mechanically rote approach to textual analysis, problem solving, and problem construction. Such an overemphasis upon logical "calculus of justification" functions has epistemological weaknesses and pedagogical…

Considers Richard Ohmann's argument that composition texts which instruct students to emphasize concrete details over abstract concepts encourage conformity with the dominant order. Suggests that Ohmann failed to consider the effects of teachers' and students' viewpoints. Cites methods that encourage students to use detail as a device of broader…

The development of critical ability, or cognitive criticism, is being studied in a two-year Swedish project described in this progress report. Cognitive criticism is valuable in all occupational fields, but especially futurology and technology assessment. This project proposes to make concrete the aims of critical training, and to identify and…

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A study involving 120 undergraduate students attending the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul (Minnesota) was undertaken to test the interactive effect of instructional strategy (structured versus constructed) with learner's prior domain knowledge in concept acquisition. Previous instructional design research on concept learning has focused on…