The capability of computers and their potential for thinking are discussed. (MK)

A sample of 108 eight-grade students using Intermediate Science Curriculum Study (ISCS) were tested with four Piagetian tasks: two tasks were related to ISCS concepts, two were not. Concludes that no students were formal operational, most were concrete operational, and most performed better on the non-ISCS related tasks. (MLH)

Describes teaching techniques used to aid junior college students' development of conceptual skills. (DD)

Describes experience using a new approach to teaching induction that was developed by the Mathematical Methods in High School Project. The basic idea behind the new approach is to use induction to prove that two formulas, one in recursive form and the other in a closed or explicit form, will always agree for whole numbers. (KHR)

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

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…

Ninth and 12th graders completed intellectual ability measures and engaged in reasoning about hypothetical arguments that were either consistent or inconsistent with their own theories. Results indicated that intellectual and verbal ability predicted each of several reasoning indexes. Neither ability measures nor age were related to reasoning…

Presents a logical reasoning problem pivotal to the novel "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" and discusses it at two levels. (Author/NB)

One third-year clinical clerkship in pediatrics has included Sherlock Holmes mysteries in its introductory curriculum, providing students with a model clinical problem-solving process and a list of issues on which they will need information. The nonclinical cases provide an effective and entertaining vehicle for learning clinical reasoning. (MSE)

Discusses the use of truth tables to help students establish valid or invalid conclusions under a given set of premises. Provides several inference examples using the truth table. (YP)

Three experiments investigated children's typical errors in judging the truth of universally quantified conditional sentences containing "P and not-Q." The error survived on sentences referring to particular things. For second- and fifth-graders, the error survived for nonuniversally quantified conditionals, and for second-graders, the…

The experience of the West Virginia University School of Pharmacy with a course in non-prescription drugs that emphasizes problem-solving through pattern recognition illustrates that when thinking skills are taught, students value, remember, and can use more of the concepts they study. (MSE)

Discusses problems with the use of "technical logic," transmuted into "comp-logic," in composition classrooms and textbooks. Maintains that students can produce more effective argumentative discourse by borrowing from either modern informal logic or neglected classical stasis theory. (SR)

Reviews controversies over different conceptions of critical thinking and its application to education. Discusses the relevance to and impact of critical thinking on bibliographic instruction. (JKP)