This monograph offers an overview of the various ways conversations about religion and religiously informed scholarship are increasing among scholars in secular and church-related colleges and universities. Specifically, it addresses the history of secularization in American higher education and scholarship, the general models of faith and…

This paper argues that the formulation of policy, at whatever level, to whatever scale or scope, is any different to the myriad of processes involved in strategic planning within and between organisations, and the attendant decision making processes that abound in such an environment (Hage, 1980; Hickson, 1987; Thompson, 1967; Weick, 1976). Those…

It is important for students to develop critical thinking and other higher-order thinking skills during their tertiary studies. Along with the ability to think critically comes the need to develop students' meta-cognitive skills. These abilities work together to enable students to control, monitor, and regulate their own cognitive processes and…

According to a study of student religiosity conducted by the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA), 80 percent of students express a strong interest in spirituality. They are not only spiritual, but they are also religious. Over half of all students attend religious services at least once per month. Indeed, according to the UCLA study, eight…

This article introduces a modification of the sentence completion task that acquaints students with various types of informational text structures (e.g., cause-effect, compare-contrast) and challenges their higher order reading and writing skills. When the individual sentences comprising an expository paragraph are intermingled with unrelated…

The present study investigates the effects of multimedia and schema induced analogical reasoning on science learning. It involves 89 fourth grade elementary students in the north-east of the United States. Participants are randomly assigned into four conditions: (a) multimedia with analogy; (b) multimedia without analogy; (c) analogy without…

The Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) program measures value added in colleges and universities, by testing the ability of freshmen and seniors to think logically and write clearly. The program is popular enough that it has attracted critics. In this paper, we outline the methods used by the CLA to determine value added. We summarize the…

This paper explores the intimate connection between creative and critical thinking, by arguing that both are inseparable in everyday reasoning. The details of the relationship between creative and critical thinking are worked out in relation to the processes of: (1) thinking through the logic of things; (2) taking command of reasoning and logic;…

This study examined college students' ability to reason about everyday issues. Previous studies are reviewed and it is concluded that issues studied in the past were often not truly "everyday." For this study, 30 students responded to 10 issues, including 4 personal and 4 personally relevant political issues. Students circled one of two positions…

Proster Theory is a theory of learning which has been proposed by Leslie A. Hart (1975). The theory is based on the functions of the brain. Learning is seen as the formation of programs, which are simply sequences of instructions by which the brain directs the muscles, sense organs, or other portions of the neurological system. Programs which are…

Three studies investigated the effects of concrete versus abstract wording and negative versus positive premises on the difficulty subjects had in solving several kinds of reasoning tasks. Subjects for all three studies were college undergraduates who received booklets containing either hypothetical, disjunctive, or linear syllogisms. Each booklet…

The booklet describes ways in which a logic teacher learned to accommodate learning disabled college students. Information on structuring the course includes general principles (such as clear expectations and a variety of learning modalities), considerations in identifying LD students, and use of a detailed course syllabus. He reviews a typical…

A technique to measure and describe concisely a certain class of individual mental reasoning processes has been developed. The measurement is achieved by recording the complete dialog between a large, varied computerized information system with a broad range of logical operations and options and a human information seeker. (Author/RC)

Argues that freshman English courses reinforce Cartesion logic, i.e., logic characterized by thinking in terms of closed systems, and prevent students from grasping more complex phenomena. (RB)

This paper describes an experiment on the "linguistic" synthesis of a controller for a model industrial plant (a steam engine). Fuzzy logic is used to convert heuristic control rules stated by a human operator into an automatic control strategy. (Author)