The Story Train is a non-profit, elementary literacy program dedicated to the development of creative writing and critical thinking skills. Those objectives are achieved through a variety of specific techniques utilized to inspire students. The four components of the program are workshop, residency, television production, and an Internet site. The…

Failure to separate judicial reasoning (the application of rules) from legislative reasoning (the justification of rules) in earlier studies is claimed to invalidate most previous developmental research using moral dilemma interviews. Two studies used a novel method of scoring moral dilemma interviews that separates judicial from legislative…

Response accuracy and response speed provide separate measures of performance. Psychometricians have tended to focus on accuracy with the goal of characterizing examinees on the basis of their ability to respond correctly to items from a given content domain. With the advent of computerized testing, response times can now be recorded unobtrusively…

The 16 units of this book are designed as textbook supplements to encourage students to think mathematically and as mathematicians. Each unit begins with an orientation session which raises general concerns that always occur within mathematical exploration. This is followed by a short, original text in which a mathematician creates a particular…

Explicit representation of relations plays some role in virtually all higher cognitive processes, but relational knowledge has seldom been investigated systematically. This paper considers how relational knowledge is involved in some tasks that have been important to cognitive development, including transitivity, the balance scale, classification…

This workbook offers a variety of quick language activities that are designed to develop grade 2-4 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;…

This book is a sequel to the book "Scamper" by the same author and builds upon the ideas of imagination development introduced in the first book. SCAMPER is an acronym with each of the seven letters serving as the initial letter or word phrases that form an idea-spurring checklist. The checklist provokes children's minds and spurs the production…

Based on a synthesis of the literature and observations of young children over 2 years, a framework for assessing probabilistic thinking was formulated, refined, and validated. For each of four major constructs incorporated into this framework--sample space, probability of an event, probability comparisons, and conditional probability--four…

The Concept Attainment Model is described as a teaching approach that helps students develop skills for inductive and deductive thinking while learning subject matter in any field in a constructive and meaningful way. A definition and overview of the model are presented, with guidelines for using the concept-attainment approach to design and…

Critical thinking in the fine arts is defined as a reasonable and reflective thinking that is focused on what to believe and to do in relation to the fine arts. It is a process designed to help students develop awareness, appreciation, and understanding as they think clearly and critically about the arts and learn to express their ideas in a…

A six-activity inquiry lesson (constructed to follow the "social inquiry" teaching model) provided students in two 11th-grade English classes with practice in theory building through data gathering and writing activities. Social inquiry has six instructional stages: students (1) are presented with a puzzling situation; (2) in small…

This study examined the effects of specially designed thinking journal activities that have been attributed with encouraging reflective thinking, on instruction using generic, or content-free, problem solving software. Sixty-three fourth grade students participated in four instructional sessions using the software package called "Moptown Hotel."…

Similarity plays a central role in cognitive theories. Research has demonstrated that the similarity of a pair increases with its commonalities and decreases with its differences. These common and distinctive elements can take the form of parts of objects, relations between parts of properties of whole objects. Previous work has been unable to…

There is a need to expand the notion of acceptable thinking practices to include nontraditional thinking and wonder. Such an approach can help students learn to deal with ambiguity. The unique design of ambiguous thought evokes wonder, discovery, interrelationships, and new connections. Ambiguous thinking refrains from making unequivocal…

The current national focus on critical thinking is unnecessarily narrow in its scope, and this mitigates against essential changes being made in the thinking and reasoning activities experienced by students. Two shortcomings, however, restrict the possibilities for change: the first results from taking a generic (versus discipline-based) view of…