An analysis is presented of the latest findings from psychology and education on how children acquire complex thinking skills and learn to reason, and how the schools can teach such skills more effectively. This paper reviews previous research, highlights successful learning strategies, and makes specific recommendations about problems and…

A broad range of well-structured problems--embracing forms of diagnosis, catalog selection, and skeletal planning--are solved in expert computer systems by the method of heuristic classification. These programs have a characteristic inference structure that systematically relates data to a pre-enumerated set of solutions by abstraction, heuristic…

The purpose of this study was to describe student perceptions within high school classes in biology and chemistry over the course of a school year. The sample consisted of 435 high school college preparatory science students who were enrolled in 44 different biology and chemistry classes in central New York State. Measurements of attitude toward…

The level of thinking that is characteristic of the typical college freshman and the skills needed by college science courses are addressed, and the Development of Reasoning in Science project (Project DORIS) at California State University, Fullerton, is described. While the typical college freshman functions at the concrete level of thinking,…

A thinking-skills course at Montana State University is described, along with recent issues concerning the potential effectiveness of such courses. Advantages and disadvantages of different designs for studying the effects of thinking-skills training are also considered. The focus of the course is: hypothesis formation and evaluation, problem…

This paper reports on an investigation of children's ability to accept contrary-to-fact premises as though they were factual and to reason accordingly. A variety of questions requiring this skill were presented in semi-structured interview form to 10 to 12 subjects from each of six age groups ranging from 5 to 9 years, and to a control group of…

Accent on Developing Abstract Processes of Thought (ADAPT) is a program designed to promote critical thinking among college students. Based on the theoretical work of Jean Piaget, it attempts to help University of Nebraska freshmen confront problems and follow them through to logical solutions. In its first year, the program's goals were to…

Research supported in part by General Research Support Award No. FR-05406 from the United States Public Health Service.

Restatement and paraphrase, and the syntactic operations that generate them, can serve as the basis for techniques involving explanation, and the production of new sentences in the second language classroom. The basic operations involved are known intuitively by the native speaker but must be taught and practiced if the ESL learner is to get a…

Conceptual level is a personal characteristic that describes persons on a developmental hierarchy of increasing conceptual complexity, self-responsibility, and independence. The relationship between gender and conceptual level was explored in a group of 70 male and 63 female college students. The This I Believe Test (TIB) was administered to…

A year-long seminar for elementary teachers in analytic thinking for children (ATC) is offered at the School of Education at Texas Wesleyan College. ATC uses philosophy and logic to help children understand how they think and to improve their reasoning. Four guidelines are given: (1) Discuss the nature and function of authorities and arguments…

Reported are results of a study that examined the relationships between university students' entry characteristics and achievement in biology. Variables judged most likely to be predictors of achievement were: (1) scholastic aptitude (quantitative and verbal); (2) level of cognitive development; (3) locus of control; (4) grade point average; (5)…

Linear syllogisms present two premises, each describing a relation between two terms. The individual's task is to infer the relation among the three terms of the linear syllogism, and then answer a question about one or more of these relations. For example, "John is taller than Bob. Sam is shorter than Bob. Who is the tallest?" Students…

It has been suggested that cognitive style interacts with performance on tasks measuring formal thought. It is hypothesized that cognitive style interacts with task context rather than with the underlying formal thought processes. Experiments are reported to clarify the type of task that elicits an interaction and to determine whether such…

This selected bibliography lists 489 monographs, articles, and reports dealing with reasoning skills and their applications to social science problems. These citations, representing those items acquired by the Center for Reasoning Studies at Piedmont Technical College, include theoretical works on problem-solving, values education,…