Teaching methods that guide pupils' mental activity and encourage them to employ rational thinking techniques are described. (DB)

Critical thinking is a cognitive skill that can be directly developed by specific practices and strategies. Creating a classroom environment that supports and nurtures critical thinking should be a consideration of vocational agriculture instructors and teacher educators. (JOW)

Gaming (the use of formal games for specific academic purposes) is a method for teaching formal thinking processes that is particularly suited to the gifted student. Various games can be used to develop deductive reasoning, the concept of subsets, inductive reasoning, and attention to detail. (Author/SW)

Outlines a theory of cognitive development designed to be useful in defining an ideal education and discusses the practical steps for achieving educational goals. Three stages of cognitive development are proposed and their implications for curriculum content and teaching strategies are discussed. (AM)

Suggests that literary study should employ student creative writing as a transition into expository critical writings and discussion of literary works. (DD)

Suggests ways that speaking and listening, reading and writing can be brought together in the learner's mind. (DD)

Defines "collective creation" as a collaborative process undertaken by actors/students and their director/teacher and the resulting creative product. Describes a study of a collective creation as an instructional practice. Suggests that collective creation teaching approaches might work effectively to serve social justice purposes in the…

Used classification and seriation games over 4 months to teach the oddity principle and insertion into a series to Head Start 4-year-olds during free play. A comparison group participated in free play without the teacher-directed classification and seriation games. At the conclusion, intervention students were significantly better than comparison…

This paper argues that Internet-based instruction should not be only perceived as a cognitive tool or a metacognitive tool; rather, it can be perceived and used as an epistemological tool. When the Internet is used as an epistemological tool for instruction, learners are encouraged to evaluate the merits of information and knowledge acquired from…

The objective of this paper is to study the use and educational application of technical resources by students of Social Education (SE) in Spain. The reasons for this research were based on the importance of gaining a deep command of the various skills associated with information and communication technologies in the acquisition of generic…

Learning science includes learning to argue with "inscriptions": images used to symbolize information persuasively. This study examined sixth-graders learning to invest inscriptions with representational status, in a geographic information system (GIS)-based science investigation. Learning to reason with inscriptions was studied in emergent…

Trickster tales, with their teachings on how to behave in the world, are a powerful means for transmitting social knowledge and cultural mores to children. In this study we compared two approaches to teaching fourth-grade students to write trickster tales. Although both instructional methods incorporated aspects of the writing process approach,…

This study explores educators' reflections on professional childcare practice in different national contexts. The data were collected by showing video clips of classroom activities in Japanese, Dutch and German pre-schools to experienced German and Dutch pre-school teachers. The clips were used to elicit their opinions on playing and learning in…

Teachers should provide more real experiences for children rather than vicarious ones, in order to allow children's cognitive structuring processes to develop.

A model for matching teaching strategies to student learning styles is intended to take seriously the issue of student needs. A variety of educational arrangements for implementation of matching are considered as well as some issues raised by such implementation. (Author/JH)