This submission contains the Proceedings of the 2008 Annual Meeting of the Canadian Mathematics Education Study Group (CMESG), held at the Universite de Sherbrooke in Sherbrooke, Quebec. The CMESG is a group of mathematicians and mathematics educators who meet annually to discuss mathematics education issues at all levels of learning. The aims of…

The research reported in this paper was designed to investigate the hypothesis that computer programming may support the teaching and learning of problem solving, but that to do so, problem solving must be explicitly taught. Three studies involved students in several grades: 4th, 6th, 8th, 11th, and 12th. Findings collectively show that five…

The results of four research studies conducted with subjects ranging in age and ability from elementary to graduate school students demonstrate that Logo programming environments can be instrumental in the development of five particular problem solving strategies: (1) subgoals formation; (2) forward chaining; (3) systematic trial and error; (4)…

It is becoming increasingly important to teach students higher-order thinking skills in addition to mere factual knowledge. Recent scientific and technological advances offer significant opportunities to implement more effective teaching of these skills. By investigating intellectual processes, cognitive science has led to a significantly better…

In the fall of 1980, a course titled Developing Critical Thinking Skills was approved at the University of Minnesota-Duluth for offering as one of the options in the liberal education category called Communication, Language, and Symbolic Systems. This paper provides a description of the course (designed to provide experiences with methods and…

A discussion is presented of the philosophy undergirding the 5-year teacher education program at the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia. In this program, students can earn a baccalaureate degree from the university and a Master of Teaching degree from the Curry School. The program seeks to produce teachers who are effective…

The focus of this paper is on some of the difficulties students experience in learning from texts and in solving other types of academic problems, because of their failure to distinguish between skills needed for everyday thinking and those needed for academic thinking. The paper discusses the types of processing problems children experience when…

The papers contained in this document were originally presented at the May 1978 conference on Modeling Mathematical Cognitive Development sponsored by the Models of Learning Mathematics Working Group of the Georgia Center for the Study of Learning and Teaching Mathematics. Most have been revised to reflect comments and suggestions made at the…

The author reviews pertinent studies conducted between 1917 and 1973 in which the introspective-retrospective technique of data gathering was employed in determining the mental processes of children in arithmetical reasoning and the difficulties encountered. (MN)

To detect the underlying structural relationship or chain among certain memorized pairs, two groups of undergraduates verbally reordered previously memorized pairs of either concrete or abstract nouns. The superior performance of the concrete word subjects was attributed to the differential effect of imaginal versus verbal encoding. (Author/CP)

Examines the findings of 53 studies of sex differences in propositional logic, combinatorial reasoning, and proportional reasoning tasks. Finds sex differences for the latter two tasks to be vulnerable to Rosenthal's "file drawer" problem and effect size to be small for all tasks. Discusses possible explanations for sex differences in…

Some potential difficulties involved in using "real-life situations" in teaching problem solving are illustrated with a racing car problem. The importance of developing mental images and the ability to abstract in the solution process is indicated. (MP)

An information-processing framework is presented for understanding intelligence. Two levels of processing are discussed: the steps involved in solving a complex intellectual task, and higher-order processes used to decide how to solve the problem. (MH)

Reports that there are few documents in the ERIC database concerning using computers as writing tools for gifted students and that the thrust of computer education for the gifted is toward developing abstract thinking only. Argues that more research is needed on classrooms for the gifted writer. (RS)