The construct of metacognition appears in an ever increasing number and range of contexts in educational, developmental, and cognitive psychology. Can it retain its status as a useful construct in the face of such diverse application? Or is it merely an umbrella term for diverse mental phenomena that are loosely if at all connected? Here I argue…

The modern education is dominantly targeted at the left hemisphere. It draws insufficient attention to the harmonization of the functioning of both brain hemispheres. This has a negative impact on the development of the abilities of children and is especially detrimental to boys and those children who are brought up in the natural environment. In…

Information flows continuously in the environment. As we attempt to do something, our senses receive large volumes of information. In any conversation, messages are exchanged rapidly. To understand meaning, we have to focus, record, choose and process relevant information at every moment, before it is displaced by other information. Often,…

This paper discusses the distinct meanings of "internalization" and "interiorization" as ways of rendering intelligible the social constitution of the psychological in a line of research that started with Piaget and extended into a post-Piagetian reformulation of intelligence in successive generations of studies of the relations between social…

The cognitive reserve hypothesis helps to explain the incomplete relationship between brain disease and cognitive status in people with neurologic diseases, including Alzheimer's; disease and multiple sclerosis. Lifetime intellectual enrichment (estimated with education or vocabulary knowledge) lessens the negative impact of brain disease on…

Significant research has been conducted into the positive effects of arts education on social and intellectual development of students across the ages of 10-15 years. Teacher competence for teaching the arts however does not appear to be as positive. A worldwide trend suggests pre-service teachers exhibit low confidence and content knowledge for…

There are good reasons to be very careful about generalizations about Catholic higher education in the United States. Recall that the 220 or so Catholic colleges and universities are of very different kinds, very different sizes, with different student bodies, and are located in different parts of a country that sometimes have quite different…

Explores the nature and consequences of developmental change in speed of information processing. Summarizes evidence indicating that age differences in processing speed reflect a global mechanism that limits processing speed on most tasks. Describes evidence that suggests a role for processing speed on the development of intelligence. (Author/MKA)

Analyzed are the processes of classification and seriation which form the child's ability to reason, based upon the results of eight years of experimental work with over 2000 children. The authors have found that there is a very close relation between the development of logical actions and that of sub-logical operations and actions. The fact that…

The study investigated preferences shown by 25 preschool children regarding the handier toy, the smaller toy, the more probable toy, the animate noun, and the first-mentioned noun as agent in interpreting semantically reversible sentences prior to adult performance. (Author/SBH)

The article suggests ways in which common aspects of theories of creativity can be understood within a framework of Piagetian constructivism. It argues that creativity has been too narrowly defined. Creative constructive abilities are available to all people interacting with their social environments and stem from natural intellectual processes.…

Although frequently discounted, imagery plays an important role in the intellectual development of gifted students. It can be useful in helping students remember, create (in the arts and in sports), and develop flexibility in thinking. Imagery may also be involved in gifted adolescents' career and life decisions. (CL)

Somewhat as Piaget proposed the existence of formal operations acting on concrete operational structures, Basseches (1978) has proposed the existence of dialectical operations acting on formal operational structures. Basseches gives a qualitative account of dialectical operations via the enumeration of 24 schemata categorized into four groups:…

Reflects on the origins and development of the author's thinking about the nature of writing and the relationship between writing and cognition. Recounts efforts to understand the effects of writing on cognition. Revises an earlier contention that literacy represents a form of cultural progress in favor of a more cautious view of writing as an…