The public expects its educational leaders--from instructional leaders and principals to college administrators and deans--to be moral exemplars. Nowhere is moral behavior more central to the central mission of teaching and learning than in the realm of academic integrity, where decisions are made daily about grading, testing, promotion,…

Although much educational research has investigated the relative effectiveness of different educational interventions and policies, little is known about the absolute net benefits of K-12 schooling independent of growth due to chronological age and out-of-school experience. The nearly universal policy of age tracking in schools makes this a…

Gestalt psychologists proposed two distinct learning mechanisms. Associative learning occurs gradually through the repeated co-occurrence of external stimuli or memories. Insight learning occurs suddenly when people discover new relationships within their prior knowledge as a result of reasoning or problem solving processes that re-organize or…

A game is a set of activities involving one or more players. It has goals, constraints, payoffs, and consequences. A game is rule-guided and artificial in some respects. (Richard Wilson, 2010). According to Garris et al. (2002), define educational game play as "voluntary, nonproductive, and separate from the real world"; and they found…

The routine jobs of yesterday are being replaced by technology and/or shipped off-shore. In their place, job categories that require knowledge management, abstract reasoning, and personal services seem to be growing. The modern workplace requires workers to have broad cognitive and affective skills. Often referred to as "21st century…

Reduction is a problem-solving strategy, relevant to various areas of computer science, and strongly connected to abstraction: a reductive solution necessitates establishing a connection among problems that may seem totally disconnected at first sight, and abstracts the solution to the reduced-to problem by encapsulating it as a black box. The…

This article explores the complementary strengths and weaknesses of grounded and abstract representations in the domain of early algebra. Abstract representations, such as algebraic symbols, are concise and easy to manipulate but are distanced from any physical referents. Grounded representations, such as verbal descriptions of situations, are…

This study examined the status of critical thinking (CT) and reasoning skills in information communication and technology (ICT) for 190 college students in a higher education system. It analyzed how the students performed in CT, reasoning, and internet copyright and ethical issues. A CT assessment was designed to analyze the CT and reasoning…

In November 2008 at Purdue University, the 2nd Workshop on Human Problem Solving was held. This workshop, which was a natural continuation of the first workshop devoted almost exclusively to optimization problems, addressed a wider range of topics that reflect the scope of the "Journal of Problem Solving." The workshop was attended by 35…

"The question for me is how can the human mind occur in the physical universe. We now know that the world is governed by physics. We now understand the way biology nestles comfortably within that. The issue is how will the mind do that as well."--Allen Newell, December 4, 1991, Carnegie Mellon University. The argument John Anderson gives…

Bethpage Union Free School District in New York is a high-performing district by almost any current accountability measure. Yet administrators and teachers worried that they were not doing enough to prepare their students as critical thinkers for the 21st century. Inspired by the curriculum framework of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, the…

How do children learn math--and why do some children struggle with it? The answers are in "Number Sense and Number Nonsense," a straightforward, reader-friendly book for education professionals and an invaluable multidisciplinary resource for researchers. More than a first-ever research synthesis, this highly accessible book brings math…

Non-determinism is one of the most important, yet abstract, recurring concepts of Computer Science. It plays an important role in Computer Science areas such as formal language theory, computability theory, distributed computing, and operating systems. We conducted a series of studies on the perception of non-determinism. In the current research,…

Students (n = 328) from US and UK universities completed four self-report measures related to intellectual competence: typical intellectual engagement (TIE), openness to experience, self-assessed intelligence (SAI), and learning approaches. Confirmatory data reduction was used to examine the structure of TIE and supported five major factors:…

The manual on problem solving was culled from a set of newspaper articles in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Each brief article typically suggests problem solving strategies and offers sample problems on which to test one's skill. Articles are organized into the categories of input, process, and output. The input section offers ideas about analysis,…