Teachers in Irvine, California, are using questioning and responding strategies with students in classrooms and with each other in peer coaching. Teachers learn to match questions to three sequential levels of thinking: input, processing, and output. (TE)

Teachers and administrators at Tanana (Alaska) City School District have designed activites to increase students' thinking skills through problem-solving strategies designed to help students assume responsibility for learning and transfer their knowledge to community needs. (TE)

Developing elementary students' critical thinking abilities and cultural awareness through direct instruction is the goal of McRAT (Multicultural Reading and Thinking), a three-year collaboration of teachers and state department reading specialists in seven Arkansas school districts. The program involves direct instruction in thinking strategies…

Teachers at Patapsco Middle School in Howard County, Maryland, are using a process model to help them introduce and then integrate thinking skills in all content areas. The model provides an eight-step framework that enables school systems to incorporate selected thinking skills into their instructional programs. (Author/TE)

Teachers at Bernards High School in Bernardsville, New Jersey, have developed their own approach to the development of thinking skills through a writing program that focuses consecutively on exploration, expression, and refinement of ideas. (TE)

Teachers at the Calverton School in Huntingtown, Maryland, have developed their own K-12 program for teaching thinking through writing in the content areas. (TE)

"Connections" is a program to help teachers infuse thinking strategies such as decision making, problem solving, communicating, and understanding into all subjects. Students work in small groups to apply each strategy to what they are studying, and these strategies are transferable not only between subjects but to the real world. (TE)

Approaches to teaching thinking such as direct teaching of thinking skills and metacognitive approaches, if applied thoughtlessly, can backfire and inhibit thinking, especially with students who are already able, but unconventional, thinkers. We do not know enough about the nature of thinking processes to warrant a mandated thinking skills…

A response to the opinion by John Baer that teaching thinking puts able thinkers at risk. The chances are greater that educators may retreat from teaching thinking if they are uncertain about the importance and possibility thereof than that able students will be harmed by efforts to help them. (Author/TE)

Evidence from the Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) program suggests that at-risk students show little understanding of content without first receiving concentrated instruction in understanding itself. Teaching thinking skills to at-risk students requires a thinking environment, consisting of exploratory conversations, stimulation of curiosity,…

This article has three goals: to set forth some general claims about the course of skill acquisition; to discuss a series of counter intuitive predictions derived from the ACT theory; and to review the state of empirical evidence relevant to these predictions. (LMO)

Children's solutions to simple word problems requiring addition or subtraction skills develop through four stages: (1) modeling with objects; (2) utilization of both modeling and counting strategies; (3) reliance on counting strategies; and (4) reliance on number facts. The current primary mathematics curriculum fails to capitilize on rich…

Research identifies two interrelated memories--one that retains facts and symbols and one that retains motor and problem-solving skills. These and other findings challenge educators to determine what students should memorize, to help them move from random memorization to creating useful concepts, and to teach students to use memory in problem…

This paper presents preliminary hypotheses about a common core of faculty beliefs about how their students learn to solve problems in their introductory courses. Using a process of structured interviews and a concept map based analysis, we find that faculty appear to believe that students learn problem solving primarily through a process of…

Analyzes the effect recordkeeping has when it is designed to assess children's problem-solving and thinking processes over time. (Author/RK)