Describes experience of teaching truth tables and problems that exercise students' critical reasoning. (KHR)

Discusses various ways of representing arrangements of tightly packed circles and poses questions concerning related functions and problems. (KHR)

A study examined the transcript of a group enquiry conducted according to the practice of philosophical enquiry with eight gifted children (ages 8-12). Use of a central metaphor was seen to play the role of a "conceptual playground," permitting the children to exercise both their imagination and their reasoning abilities. (Contains references.)…

Emphasizes the importance of children exploring hands-on and minds-on mathematics. Presents a midpoint shape activity for students to explore the midpoint shape of familiar quadrilaterals, such as squares and rectangles. (KHR)

Describes the design of an exercise to foster critical thinking skills in a freshman chemistry course. Emphasizes practical issues involved in the use and implementation of the rubric to promote critical thinking. The intellectual standards that define critical thinking skills are embedded in the rubric. (Author/NB)

Discusses use of the World Wide Web in education and its possibilities for developing higher order critical thinking skills to successfully deal with the demands of the future information society. Suggests that teachers need to provide learning environments that are learner-centered, authentic, problem-based, and collaborative. (Contains 61…

Explains how high-level play is an instructional strategy that builds language, vocabulary, and underlying cognitive skills necessary for children to become successful readers and writers. Notes that high-level play in the classroom occurs in two major areas, manipulative materials play and dramatic play. Explains that in dramatic play the teacher…

Outlines the attempts of two fictional journalism students to learn the correct way to interview. Emphasizes the importance of doing homework and researching multiple angles. Explains that thinking of questions and taking careful notes are important steps in the process. (PM)

The complex relationship between cognitive developmental research and children's science curricula is explored, focusing on the tendency to attribute shortcomings in performance to the child's age, the confounding of weak knowledge with developmentally based deficiency, and emphasis of stage-based constraints on children's thinking. (SLD)

Discusses how teachers in six primary classrooms taught children to synthesize information (regarding reading, social studies, math, science, and social skills). Notes the central role that talk played in both the childrens' learning to synthesize and in the teachers' clarifying what they were researching and how they could best help the children.…

Examined children's naturally occurring arguments sampled from transcripts of discussions in fourth-grade classrooms. Found that children's arguments had vague referring expressions, sometimes did not contain explicit conclusions, and seemed to lack explicit warrants to authorize conclusions. Missing or oblique information was usually given in the…

Reviews the literature on dispositional factors related to critical thinking, focusing on two characteristics: individuals' need for cognition and tolerance of ambiguity. Describes a study of 198 university students investigating the relationship between critical thinking skills and disposition, reporting a strong correlation between ability and…

Identifies the more representative problem-solving models in environmental education. Suggests the addition of a strategy for defining a problem situation using Soft Systems Methodology to environmental education activities explicitly designed for the development of critical thinking. Contains 45 references. (JRH)

College students (n=349) completed an argument evaluation test in which they evaluated arguments about real-life situations. Argument quality and strength of prior beliefs were used to create an index of differences that were reliably linked to differences in cognitive ability and actively open-minded thinking. (SLD)

Traditional conceptions of problem solving in education are critiqued, and a new framework is proposed to conceptualize open- ended problem solving in ill-structured domains. How innovative curriculum design is informed by this conceptualization is described, and research findings from studies in grades 4 through 12 are presented. (SLD)