This article offers four models of what may be going wrong in the transmission of thinking skills from textbooks and teachers to students. Sources of the problem are identified and possible solutions, alternatives, and strategies of "teaching for thinking" are described. (JL)

Administered The Matching Familiar Figures Test to 45 seven- and eight-year-olds to assess the relationship between cognitive style and temperamental variables such as distractibility, persistence, and mood. (HOD)

The effect of cognitive style on the performance of four groups of college students (n=326) who used different strategies of study to comprehend prose was investigated. The cognitive styles of the subjects (field dependence/independence) interacted with the strategies of study and seem to affect performance on comprehension of prose at posttest.…

Three qualitative problems designed to explore differences in cognitive style were given to 48 undergraduate biology students in England. Two components of cognitive style were identified: problem perception (analytic, holistic, versatile) and ability to integrate the problem with their existing knowledge (high, low). Student problem-solving…

Examined the relationship between social adjustment and problem solving skills in samples of popular, aggressive, and isolated boys. Popular boys generated more problem solutions than the other groups. Data showed deviant boys are deficient in generating solutions but not in evaluations of presented solutions. (Author/RC)

Reports a study of the relationship between nonverbal analytical perception and performance on a standardized science achievement test among premedical and predental students. Hypothesized that students with above-average scores on the Embedded Figures Test would attain higher than average achievement scores, as compared with students with…

Recent studies on how students solve problems are summarized and suggestions are made of how engineering teachers can apply this information. (BB)

One group of Illinois secondary agriculture students was taught using a problem-solving approach (PSA), the other with a subject-matter approach (SMA). A problem-solving posttest and Group Embedded Figures Test showed significantly higher problem-solving ability in the PSA group. Field independent learners in the PSA group significantly increased…

Seven theme articles discuss the importance for vocational agricultural teachers to allow students to work through the solution to problems posed in classroom situations, learning and teaching styles, the Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills report, the use of experimentation as experiential learning, and problem solving as the key…

Investigated diagnostic problem solving of doctoral and nondoctoral school psychologists, educational diagnosticians, and school psychology graduate students (n=125) through use of computer simulation of typical school referral problem and verbal retrospective think-aloud protocol. Results suggest that education and experience were unrelated to…

An experiment was conducted to investigate the innovative performance of problem solving groups (n=196) with three different blends of cognitive styles. As predicted, groups with a heterogeneous blend of styles outperformed groups with completely or partially homogeneous blends. Participant satisfaction, however, was lower for heterogeneous teams.…

This study investigated the ways in which the technological tool, The Geometer's Sketchpad, mediated the understandings that high school Honors Geometry students developed about geometric transformations by focusing on their uses of technological affordances and the ways in which they interpreted technological results in terms of figure and…

There has been much discussion recently of the effect that gender and learning style have on student performance. Educators have attempted to develop new teaching and assessment strategies that accommodate a variety of learning styles, and both males and females are becoming more aware of gender-related traits and their relationship to classroom…

Extension educators can benefit from using a variety of styles when participating in learning and problem-solving coalitions. The first section of this paper describes nine stages of the coalition-building process, which can be grouped into three phases. In the emergence phase, issues and concerns have heated up and risen to the surface, and…

"Understanding Adult Intelligence" (Robert Sternberg) focuses on the nature of intelligence. It explains Sternberg's triarchic theory, in which he posits three main aspects of intelligence: its relation to the internal or mental world of the learner, its relation to experience, and its relation to the surrounding world. "Strategies and Learning"…