Reports the efforts of the California Assessment Program (CAP) to interject critical thinking items into its new statewide social studies tests. Provides definitions of the critical thinking skills tested by the 8th grade social studies CAP test, and lists 100 critical thinking skills vocabulary words. (JDH)

Provides examples of if-then and combinatorial reasoning situations that have proved successful with college students and can be used with secondary school students. Proposes that practice with these problem solving processes can eliminate the need to memorize formulas that students may not understand. (ML)

Discusses a new syllabus produced by the New York State Education Department called "Latin for Communication." The primary goal of the syllabus is the development of skills in reading Latin, supported by the skills of listening, speaking, and writing. (SED)

Reports on two studies during which 6-, 8-, and 10-year-old children were interviewed about three different types of regularities or rules: social conventions, physical laws, and logical necessities. Shows that older children made more distinctions between social and nonsocial items than did younger children. (HOD)

Demonstrates the usefulness of the inclusion paradigm as a methodological tool in providing information about the conceptual breadth of selected social and nonsocial superordinate categories in children who exhibit some degree of inclusion logic. (HOD)

Describes teaching students how to evaluate materials containing judgments based on a modification of a model by J. E. Sparks and C. Johnson called the pyramid of reading power. (EL)

Lawson's test was used with 66 ninth grade and 63 tenth grade students. Results show: that boys outperformed girls; a small correlation between achievement in science and mathematics and the Lawson test; and that Israeli students achieved significantly higher than United States students on the Piagetian skills measured by the test. (Author/JN)

This study examined whether postprimary education enhances informal reasoning skills, operationalized as skill in constructing arguments about everyday issues. Eight subject groups, balanced for six, ranged over high school, college, graduate school, and nonstudents with or without bachelor's degrees. (Author/BS)

Specific modes of formal reasoning and measurements of principled moral reasoning ability were obtained from 99 10th-grade students. Hierarchical relationships were found amoung variables with combinatorial and correlational reasoning accounting for 22 percent of the variance in principled moral reasoning. Theoretical and educational implications…

Math and science instruction now often includes more brief, informal writing exercises, sometimes completed in class, as a means of helping college students think more clearly. While writing skills are not emphasized, student writing often improves as a by-product. (MSE)

Investigated effects of teaching an explicit approach to problem solving on the mathematical chemistry achievement of preparatory college students (with a control group being taught dimensional analysis as its problem-solving strategy). No difference in cumulative achievement between the groups was found. Interpretations of the results obtained…

Contends that current efforts to resolve the crisis in science education will have very little impact on the problem as a whole. Suggests that preservice and inservice teacher education programs focus on helping teachers grasp subject matter and their capacity for abstract, logical reasoning. (JN)

Indicates that students who were taught by direct instruction to use specific steps in working through analogy problems significantly improved in their ability to solve analogies. (FL)

The renewed interest in teaching thinking skills results from concern about the failings of the current system. Some thinking skills programs emphasize cognitive processes, while others are concerned with heuristics, development of formal operations, language and symbols, or thinking as subject matter. (TE)

Describes a thinking skills program in Oklahoma that has brought about a significant rise in achievement test scores. Teaching strategies are based on the premise that students learn new things based on the resemblance between new and familiar words and ideas. (TE)