This article offers an overview of the nature and role of relational thinking and relational reasoning in human learning and performance, both of which pertain to the discernment of meaningful patterns within any informational stream. Distinctions between thinking and reasoning relationally are summarized, along with specific forms of patterning…

Theories of mind are implicitly embedded in educational research. The predominant theory of mind during the latter half of the twentieth century has focused primarily on the individual mind in isolation, context-free problem-solving and mental representations and reasoning, what we refer to as "cognitivism." Over the last two decades, CS…

The hypothesis for this study assumed that subjects who received a diagram representing the structural relationships of a story would be more likely to solve a new and analogous problem than subjects who received two analogs without a diagram. The 151 graduate students who acted as subjects were randomly assigned to one of four treatments: one or…