Worksheets, games, and bulletin board ideas to help students develop the ability to recognize cause and effect relationships are presented. The worksheets are divided into five levels which correspond to levels 9-13 of the 1976 Ginn and Company reading series. The teacher introduction offers student objectives for each level, test information, and…

Investigated the general relationship between children's performance on social and physical measures of cognitive functioning, possible sex differences in performance on the two types of tasks, and the relationship between boys' and girls' performances on these tasks and age and IQ. (SDH)

An extensive bibliography on teaching thinking skills is presented. This bibliography incorporates from an earlier one (1989) the available relevant references in the field of cognitive education as well as new references that have appeared since early 1989. This field of cognitive education is expanding at such a rapid rate that no bibliography…

This paper questions teacher evaluation based solely on "research based competencies" or "generic teaching skills" divorced from subject content or specific context. Three topics are discussed: (1) the use of the word "skill" in educational discourse; (2) the implications of such usage; and (3) the plausibility of…

The success of critical thinking courses poses a significant threat to the conception and status of the humanities. In an effort to remediate deficiencies in the writing and reading skills of students attempting to undertake college-level work, courses have been developed which aim to improve the cognitive skills needed for effective…

This collection of papers on semantics and cohesion is organized into two sections: Meaning and Semantics, and Textual Cohesion. Titles and authors are as follows: "Functional Text Semantics, Idioms, and Variability" (Jan-Ola Ostman); "On the Degree of Motivation in Signs Used in Metaphors Involving Plant Symbolism" (Ralf…

Research findings that indicate the need for greater integration in the development of verbal and mathematical skills for college technical majors are presented in this paper. Although the project discussed was originally designed to isolate language-related difficulties that affect mathematical skills among bilingual Hispanic students, some…

Critical thinking comprises the mental processes, strategies, and representations people use to solve problems, make decisions, and learn new concepts. The study of critical thinking combines the educational, philosophical, and psychological traditions of thought. R. Ennis offers a philosophical taxonomy suggesting that critical thinking results…

It is becoming increasingly important to teach students higher-order thinking skills in addition to mere factual knowledge. Recent scientific and technological advances offer significant opportunities to implement more effective teaching of these skills. By investigating intellectual processes, cognitive science has led to a significantly better…

College students who were either monolingual speakers of English or bilingual Hispanics participated in two studies dealing with the comprehension of sentences containing negations. Both the influence of different sentence constructions on comprehension, as well as the heuristics and misconceptions exhibited by subjects as they attempted to…

This pamphlet reviews five reports that highlight an emerging consensus among researchers about the value of systematically incorporating cognitive instruction into the elementary school curriculum. First is a comprehensive framework by Robert J. Marzano and C. L. Hutchins for an integrated approach to thinking skills that has been developed and…

The subjects for this study, which examined the relationship of cognitive style and ability to the initial acquisition of computer programming competence, were 46 college students enrolled in a computer literacy course. The selected cognitive style (field-independence) and three cognitive abilities (logical reasoning, spatial ability, and…

One formal operational schema, hypothetical-deductive reasoning, is seen as most important to effective decisionmaking in planning and carrying out classroom lessons. While it is clear that formal thought schema are widely used in teaching, it is also understood that these reasoning schema are themselves dependent upon the more fundamental…

An ongoing, interdisciplinary reading program for students in grades 7-10 in Perris Union High School District (California) is described. Initiated in 1979 as a result of low reading scores, the program divides all incoming seventh grade students into homogeneous groups. In the first 6 weeks of school these new groups meet once a day for 50…

Project THISTLE: Thinking Skills in Teaching and Learning was designed to improve both the reflective thinking capabilities of urban high school students and their pre-college preparation. This study was conducted to elicit teacher perceptions of factors inhibiting reflective thinking in schools. Most important among the perceived constraints on…