This paper reports results from an Australian study into how teachers see features of quality in student work and connect these to next-step teaching. Data were drawn from a national 3 year project investigating teacher judgement using A-E standards. The project developed scaled exemplars of authentic student written performance assessments to…

In this study, a spreadsheet-based visualized Mindtool was developed for improving students' learning performance when finding relationships between numerical variables by engaging them in reasoning and decision-making activities. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, an experiment was conducted on the "phenomena of climate…

In this paper, we integrate organizational, engineering education, and educational learning literature to develop a model of student learning so as to research how learning style, behavioral tendencies, gender, and race have the potential to act as facilitators or barriers to the learning process. We argue that the gains in higher-order cognitive…

The paper discusses issues related to concepts of preferences and choice-making among persons with severe disabilities. Included are suggestions for acknowledging preferences, teaching choice as a decision-making process, and the broader implications of choice-making among persons with severe handicaps as an expression of personal autonomy and…

Any teaching act is the result of a decision, either conscious or unconscious. Previous research on basic teaching skills examined alternative teaching acts, such as explaining, questioning, reinforcing, without examining how teachers choose between one or another act. This paper argues that the basic teaching skill is decision making. This…

This paper develops a comprehensive and coordinated strategy for teaching critical reading and rational decision-making skills to college students. Five skills are identified as essential for developing sound reasoning processes: (1) developing an objective viewpoint, (2) identifying and clarifying an evaluative statement--the difference between…

The paper reports results of a study to determine the impact of values decision-making activities on the content retention and attitudes of high school social studies students. The study used the Casteel-Stahl approach to values education. This approach maintains that students must engage in four phases of thinking during values/moral classroom…

In this article, some of the essential factors to a good technical program are identified. Seen as three major factors are: (1) teaching students to define problems; (2) teaching students that most engineering problems have more than one solution and contain trade-offs; (3) instilling a desire for continuous education. (MA)

Pedagogical intelligence is analyzed, with particular emphasis on teacher decision-making strategies, the role of experience, and developmental aspects. Ways in which teacher educators can help foster pedagogical intelligence and specific examples of practices being tried are presented. (IAH)

Revealing or visualizing the thinking involved in making clinical decisions is a challenge. A case study is presented with a visual implement for sharing the diagnostic process. This technique adapts the Bayesian approach to the case presentation. Pretest probabilities and likelihood ratios are gathered to obtain post-test probabilities of every…

In the last few years, a rhetoric of inquiry has emerged to complement the rhetoric of the finished word. New interest in the "pre-writing" activities--e.g., audience analysis, concept formation, and the discovery of judgments which order and give meaning to experience--has manifested itself both in research into the nature of these activities and…

The problem of this research was to construct a list of behaviorally specifiable objectives for secondary school teachers to use in teaching the higher cognitive skills (ie., problem solving, rational thinking, and discovery) as well as subject matter. Process, as contrasted with content, was the focus. The specific Thought Process Objectives are…

At the present time there is increased emphasis on the need to teach critical thinking in schools. "Critical thinking" is proclaimed as the new answer to what ails the schools of the United States. The problem, however, is how does one define critical thinking, and even if a definition can be given, how does one teach it? The idea that it is…

An analysis of informal reasoning and examination of teaching practices looks at ways to improve reasoning skills in college students. Teaching students to reason more effectively is an important but difficult goal of higher education. Reasoning consists of complex skills which must be taught. Effective instruction is based on two key features:…