The relationship of cognitive development to learning science is considered. Views of thinking from both a psychological and a scientific standpoint are compared in order to shed light on current science teaching practice. Metacognition and problem solving are discussed. (Author/MT)

The goal of this unified theory of human reasoning is to specify what constitutes reasoning and to characterize the psychological distinction between inductive and deductive reasoning. The theory views reasoning as the controlled and mediated application of three processes (encoding, comparison and selective combination) to inferential rules. (JAZ)

Reports reasoning skills of graduate nutrition students assessed on the basis of their performance on Piagetian-styled tests. Teaching strategies suggested by Piagetian theory resulted in significant gains in the use of more effective reasoning skills where as the traditional lecture-discussion format did not. Nutrition educational and training…

Reports that spatial ability was unrelated to formal reasoning task performance. Notes that sex differences occurred with balance tasks and pendulum tasks, suggesting male superiority at manifesting proportionality and isolating variables. (Author/RL)

Describes characteristics of successful problem solvers and reports programs at all educational levels designed to help students improve their skills. (Author/MLF)

Three basic orientations to problem solving are defined and related to four profiles of problem environment. The contingency between problem-solving orientations and problem environment is presented by means of three formal models that are translated to fit the students' learning environment. Implications for further studies are discussed. (JD)

Comments on the articles presented in this issue devoted to the Japanese perspectives on conceptual change. Discusses the overall conveyed message: The human cognitive system is a thematically organized knowledge base with agentive causality as the main mechanism for explain phenomena and analogy as the main mechanism for promoting conceptual…

Comments on the articles presented in this issue devoted to the Japanese perspectives on conceptual change. Suggests that different approaches to knowledge acquisition and conceptual change should be carefully examined in light of their implications for the teaching of science. Discusses critically the issues advanced from the Japanese…

People spontaneously discover new representations during problem solving. Discovery of a mathematical representation is of special interest, because it shows that the underlying structure of the problem has been extracted. In the current study, participants solved gear-system problems as part of a game. Although none of the participants initially…

Cross-sectional and longitudinal data from students as they advance through the middle school years (grades 6-8) reveal insights into the development of students' pattern generalization abilities. As expected, students show a preference for lower-level tasks such as "reading the data," over more distant predictions and generation of abstractions.…

Deductive reasoning problems were presented to 72 public elementary school students, half of whom were identified as gifted (mean age of 9.6 years) and half of whom were regular education students (mean age of 9.3 years). They were used to test an hypothesis that gifted children who score significantly higher than average on standardized…

A long-standing issue in cognitive psychology is the question of content effects upon problem-solving skills, that is, do students' problem-solving abilities generalize across specific subject matter domains? Although Piaget argued that formal reasoning strategies are independent of content, the well-known decalogs of Piaget can be interpreted as…

The conversion model of formal reasoning was examined for its ability to predict the decisions made by college students when solving concrete and abstract syllogisms. Results supported the model's contentions that reasoner's decisions reflect natural language processes in the encoding of syllogistic premises, and follow rationally from…

Representative samples of curriculum development in social studies are presented based on a model designed to involve students actively in both the historical and dilemma-solving processes. (MJB)

Discusses critical thinking as the process of moving fluently among abstraction levels. Defines three components involved in fluency of movement: (1) knowledge, or an awareness of the existence of abstraction levels; (2) payoff, or the reason for acquiring fluency; and (3) timing, or a consciousness of abstraction levels at a given time and place.…