This article develops the ideas of perfection and education in Spinoza and Maimonides. Both thinkers identify human perfection with intellectual knowledge and a transformation in affect. They accordingly envision education in terms of enhancing cognition and shaping the desire to know. The first steps are a critical evaluation of imagination and…

The effect of online argumentation and reflective thinking-based science teaching on sixth-grade students' epistemic cognition, metacognition, and logical thinking was explored in this study. The research was carried out in the 2020-2021 academic year when all teaching was online due to COVID-19. Students in the study sample were mostly from…

How people see the world, even how they research it, is influenced by beliefs. Some beliefs are conscious and the result of research, or at least amenable to research. Others are largely invisible. They may feel like "common knowledge" (though myth, not knowledge), unrecognized premises that are part of the surrounding culture. As we…

Relational thinking plays a central role in human cognition. However, it is not known how children and adults acquire relational concepts and come to represent them in a form that is useful for the purposes of relational thinking (i.e., as structures that can be dynamically bound to arguments). The authors present a theory of how a psychologically…

This article emphasizes the need to encourage undergraduate students to develop arguments, which involves enhancing their analytical skills and capacity for critical thinking, across disciplines regardless of level. It argues that these skills, required by the Quality Assurance Agency's (QAA) benchmarks, are developed not by instruction, but by…

To analyze the relationship of logical development and comprehension of syntax, 60 children aged 5-8 years were individually tested. Measures included class inclusion, conservation of substance and weight, a sorting test, and a test of comprehension of active and passive sentences. Class inclusion was not strongly related to syntactical…

Ten kindergarten and 46 first grade children were given two-choice object discrimination problems, during which a prompt indicated the positive (rewarded) object, P. Guided by the prompt, all Ss subjects displaced P and therefore observed only its reward value; no direct observation was made of the reward value of the negative (nonrewarded)…

Concludes that the role of the teacher as researcher in children's development of thinking and socialization through play is multi-dimensional. The initial function is the internal analysis of children's thinking and interaction within a variety of settings. (Author)

Information obtained in this study involving 72 girls (6-, 9-, and 12-year-olds) documents the facilitating effect of forced verbalization at three age levels. (Author/WY)

Reasoning and logical thinking can be defined and explained from different perspectives. Three approaches are reviewed in this report; they are: (1) the logical structure approach; (2) the Piagetian approach of developmental stages; and (3) the information processing or memory approach. Four hypotheses related to these approaches were investigated…

The purpose of the present study was to determine if a developmental sequence could be established for the appearance of conservation. A series of four dimensional tasks and a conservation task were administered to 25 kindergarten girls and 25 kindergarten boys. The dimensional tasks tested understanding of comparative and superlative terms along…

Very little cognitive development research has been done among African children, and most of the completed studies have relied on "translated" versions of Western test materials that are inappropriate to the African milieu. This paucity of research has had two affects: (1) rural African children have been represented as somewhat less…

Children's use of causal and logical connectives was examined before and after treatments based on advance organizers with social studies lessons. In samples of 120 children from age-levels 6 and 10 years a diminution in the use of syncretic reasoning and understanding followed the experimental treatment. (Editor)

Programs to teach students critical thinking must empower them to be self-directed, but they must also stress respect and empathy for the viewpoints of others. (Author/TE)