This article suggests that a Piagetian approach to education of the deaf can be applied to understanding what occurs as a deaf child comes to a point of knowledge. The article reviews current research on the relationship between language acquisition and cognitive development, and applies this research to education of deaf children. (Author/JDD)

At Arizona State University, undergraduate teacher candidates were asked to make biweekly journal entries relating course content to beliefs and knowledge about teaching, classroom applications, children's probable responses, and personal reflections about teaching and learning. Many students organized their entries according to a…

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

Sets forth theoretical propositions developed in the four-year-old Critical Spirit Project in Los Angeles, California. Contends that students learn to reason critically as they are initiated into school communities that grant importance to critical reasoning and treat instruction in critical thinking as a form of character education. (25…

The purpose of this article is to disclose and comment upon some of the conceptual and empirical confusions that confront a revised concept of intelligence which sees intelligence as general skill(s) that can be directly taught rather than as a relatively fixed ability. Implications for teaching thinking skills are discussed. (IAH)

Offers nine citations from the ERIC database which point to resources for developing students' critical thinking skills. (MG)

Describes Project Write which uses a hierarchy of critical thinking skills in the formation of concepts and theories. Describes how students use computers to brainstorm, categorize, verify, sequence story details, and create a main idea and conclusion for their expository writing. (RS)

A recent study analyzing 6,942 items from the Stanford achievement batteries determined that few general cognitive operations were included in the items analyzed. The general cognitive operations that were found had little to do with the items' difficulty. Students are not being taught certain necessary, but untested, cognitive skills. Includes 23…

Discussion of learners' prior knowledge focuses on a method for exploring common-sense reasoning by engaging secondary school students in the development of an expert system representing their own intuitive expertise. Students' intuitive concerns are discussed; patterns of reasoning are examined; and epistemic planes are described. (23 references)…

The entire staff of one New York elementary school was trained in Developmental Activities Project to understand how students develop logical thinking, how to assess each student's developmental level, and how to create an appropriate learning environment. DAP is based on Piaget's 46 concrete mental structures, including classification, relations,…

Twelve students with autism and 12 with mental retardation, who had passed a first-order test of false belief, were given a second-order reasoning task. No intergroup performance differences were seen. Findings suggest that the difficulty for both groups with the second-order task lies in information processing demands rather than conceptual…

Children were asked whether someone would get sick from drinking juice placed near a bug. Some preschoolers and most seven- and eight-year olds recognized the need for physical contact with the bug to make the juice noxious, whereas some believed the mere presence of a contaminant made it noxious. Thus, associational contamination sometimes plays…

This study examines the cognitive and affective impact of a multimedia editing task. Students were highly motivated to work cooperatively and without teacher supervision to search out and remember science content materials from a wide variety of resources, with visual recall being especially promoted. (34 references) (LZ)

Presents an example involving the metabolism of carbohydrates by microorganisms that provides results that contradict the generally speculated outcome, which is not an unusual situation in many scientific investigations. (JRH)

Investigates difficulties in thinking about interactions between variables and suggests remedial educational means. Reports that expert thinkers demonstrate thinking about interactions at both an operational and metastrategic level. Lay adults, however, encounter substantial difficulties in drawing valid interaction inferences while engaged in an…