Glyphs, a way of representing data pictorially, are a new way for elementary students to collect, display, and interpret data. This book contains a number of glyph activities that can be used as creative educational tools for grades 1-3. Each glyph has three essential construction elements: the glyph survey (the questions that are asked), the…

This workbook offers a variety of quick language activities that develop grade 4-6 students' associative-reasoning and problem-solving skills. The activities in the workbook cover vocabulary development, classifying, sequencing, following directions, and word recognition. Sections of the workbook are Categories; Ordering; Missing Vowels; Think…

The title of this book is an acronym that serves to describe the mental activity the games of the book are intended to bring about. Each of the seven letters in "scamper" is the initial letter for the word phrases making up the checklist used to create the Scamper games. Sections of the book include: (1) "Scampering with the Experts--Thinking and…

In the periodic testing environment associated with conventional paper-and-pencil tests, the frequency with which items are seen by test-takers is tightly controlled in advance of testing by policies that regulate both the reuse of test forms and the frequency with which candidates may take the test. In the continuous testing environment…

Critical thinking is a cultivation of that strand of traditional education which stresses the cultivation of wisdom and its application to both practice and life. To strengthen critical thinking in schools and colleges, it is necessary to know its defining features, its characteristic outcomes, and its underlying conditions. The outcomes of…

Both writing and critical thinking are based in context; students write and think best about subjects in which they are knowledgeable. Neither can therefore be regarded as a generic basic skill. Linear conceptions of learning which permeate both informal and formal views of education, writing, and critical thinking set students up for failure.…

Dialectical thinking has values for education that have been largely overlooked by researchers and educators. Dialectical thinking refers to the ability to view issues from multiple perspectives and to arrive at the most economical and reasonable reconciliation of seemingly contradictory information and postures. Dialectical thinking is a form of…

A study determined if the Directed Reading-Thinking Activity (DR-TA) method would raise levels of critical thinking in students. Subjects, 20 third-grade students, used the DR-TA for 30 minutes each day for a period of approximately 8 weeks. Subjects were pre- and posttested using the Thinking Skills Assessment and the Reading Attitude Inventory.…

The purpose of this study was to update the findings of previous quantitative research related to the effects of various student characteristics on measures of science achievement, cognitive reasoning, and science attitudes using the meta-analytic approach. Furthermore, the magnitude of the relationships between the study outcomes and the…

The use of a visual representation in learning about proportional relations was studied, examining students' understandings of the invariance of a multiplicative relation on both sides of a proportion equation and the invariance of the structural relations that exist in different semantic types of proportion problems. Subjects were 49 high-ability…

Many practitioners in the writing field tend to think of research skills as logical, analytical, abstracting abilities, not as personal, expressive or imaginative. Even many contemporary literary and composition theorists believe that theory must be divorced from everyday life. According to Richard Rorty, in many intellectual circles, the more…

Within the education environment, writing journals are being used across the curriculum and for a variety of purposes--they are often recognized as a means for prompting students to apply the perspective of a particular discipline to their own lives or to facilitate their gaining perspective on personal transitions. Successful use of journals in…

This paper presents three experiments examining competence in the domain of proportional reasoning in several age groups (adult, and children in kindergarten, first, third, and fifth grade). In the three experiments, subjects indicated which of two flower boxes had the greater density of flowers. In experiments 1 and 2, the flowers were presented…

Creative thinking and critical thinking are often thought of as two distinct, separate processes; however, each is a necessary component of the other. The challenge of critical thinking as creativity is to identify and transcend the nonessential criteria associated with the domain in which the critical thinking is exercised while not abandoning…

Noting that words like "alienation,""ideology," and "hegemony" are cropping up in academic journals (particularly those journals that concern themselves with rhetoric) with more and more frequency, this paper explains some of the basic terms used by the political left. The paper notes that such terms tend to come up…