Despite the critical role of reasoning in shaping language teaching and learning strategies in higher education, prior studies have either separately examined reasoning or focused on one specific type thereof and language teaching and learning strategies. To address this gap, this study took a comprehensive approach by examining various types of…

Pteridophyte classification has undergone many changes both from morphology as well as phylogeny aspects. Thus, a variety of learning experiences are required to promote understanding on concepts and managing learning activities--this study aimed at determining the impact of CIRGI and CirGi Unification on students' metacognitive skills. A…

Students' solutions of enumerative combinatorial problems may be assessed along two main dimensions: the correctness of the solution and the method of enumeration. This study looks at the second dimension with reference to the Cartesian product of two sets, and at the 'odometer' combinatorial strategy defined by English (1991). Since we are not…

Marketing educators have long espoused the importance of critical thinking as a means of developing students' higher-order problem-solving skills. In this article, we utilize an historical approach to investigate how educators have defined, operationalized, and empirically evaluated the critical thinking construct. To accomplish this, we review…

This study examines patterns in middle-grade boys' and girls' written problem solving strategies for a mathematical task involving proportional reasoning. The students participating in this study attend a coeducational charter middle school with single-sex classrooms. One hundred nineteen sixth-grade students' responses are analyzed by gender…

Research on memory functions and their applications is a vast field that has unfolded for decades; some important studies are sixty years old. However, the research has remained a well-kept secret of cognitive psychologists. Education faculties rarely teach memory specifics, so people working in education typically do not know about the above…

Development in any domain is often characterized by increasingly abstract representations. Recent evidence in the domain of shape recognition provides one example; between 18 and 24 months children appear to build increasingly abstract representations of object shape [Smith, L. B. (2003). Learning to recognize objects. "Psychological…

Presents strategies designed to provide students with an organizational pattern to help them generate clear thinking, reading, and writing. (RS)

This guest editorial describes ways teachers can use guessing games about an unknown item in a "mystery box" to help children improve their abilities to listen to others, recall information, ask purposeful questions, classify items by class, make inferences, synthesize information, and draw conclusions. The author presents information…

This article introduces a series of papers that explain and illustrate how a higher order thinking curriculum can be designed for a full spectrum of students, including students with learning disabilities. The article discusses an approach in which concepts, rules, and strategies are taught by organizing content around the process of noting…

Noting that the ability to think critically and creatively can be encouraged even in the very young, this book provides practical strategies and lesson plans for introducing children in kindergarten through grade 3 to the fun and rigors of skillful thinking. The first set of four lessons is designed to start children thinking and to lay the…

This paper investigates the need for the infusion of critical thinking instruction into the teaching of the journalistic practice of questioning. Given research done in the area of questioning, it seems probable that critical thinking instruction could enable students to employ self-directed thinking skills that would allow them to ask better…

An ethnographic study was conducted with the goal of evaluating the botanical concepts of sixth-grade students. One aspect of the study involved examination of the levels of abstraction students use for naming plants. Nine sixth-grade students were interviewed individually. Each was asked to identify the plants seen in a set of 64 slides and…

Effects of task demands, age, and skill level on memory and metamemory performance were examined for 62 average and 66 low-achieving learning-disabled children. Memory improved with age and skill level, and strategic metamemory revealed age and skill-level differences, but taxonomic metamemory revealed age differences in the average group only.…

Discussed is whether embedding generative cognitive strategies in microcomputer courseware improves student performance on cognitive assessment measures and on insect classification tasks. The effects of transactional software on students' knowledge of insect anatomy and principles of insect classification were also investigated. (KR)