Between good intentions and great results lies a program theory--not just a list of tasks but a vision of what needs to happen, and how. Now widely used in government and not-for-profit organizations, program theory provides a coherent picture of how change occurs and how to improve performance. "Purposeful Program Theory" shows how to develop,…

Prior work shows that children can make inductive inferences about objects based on their labels rather than their appearance (Gelman, 2003). A separate line of research shows that children's trust in a speaker's label is selective. Children accept labels from a reliable speaker over an unreliable speaker (e.g., Koenig & Harris, 2005). In the…

Evaluative categories include items that share the same value-laden assessment. Given that these categories have not been examined extensively within the child concepts literature, the present research explored evaluative categorization and induction within the domain of food as a test case. Specifically, two studies examined the categories of…

Counterfactuals are routinely used in physical and biological sciences to develop and evaluate sophisticated, non-linear models. They have been used with telling effect in the study of economic history and American politics. For some historians, counterfactual arguments have no scholarly standing. They consider them flights of fancy, fun over a…

The seven chapters of this special issue explore problems in how to better understand the reasoning process that is used to establish evaluative conclusions. The many unanswered questions about reasoning should stimulate further investigation of the meaning of sound evaluative reasoning. (SLD)

Describes teaching students how to evaluate materials containing judgments based on a modification of a model by J. E. Sparks and C. Johnson called the pyramid of reading power. (EL)

Suggests that business communication curricula should include instruction in critical thinking, and offers ways in which students can practice their critical thinking skills using business curricula. (JC)

Designed to contribute to the growing effort to teach critical thinking skills, this guide provides teachers with (1) a simple, usable set of definitions for recall, analysis, comparison, inference, and evaluation; (2) brief explanations of three common forms of classroom assessment (oral questioning during instruction, paper and pencil objective…