This curriculum program is intended to promote the development of primary grade children's ability to think. A number of learning activities or tasks are presented along with the teaching strategy to be used in implementing them. The first part of the book describes aspects of the teaching strategy, including selecting activities, preparing for…

This study assesses the abilities of kindergarten children who attended the Mt. Druitt Early Childhood Project (MDECP) in Australia to apply logical processes to mathematic problems not generally found in the classroom. The mathematical abilities of 56 children enrolled in one of the MDECP's five programs (competency, cognitive, behaviorist,…

The set of three units, designed for middle and junior high school gifted students, includes 30 lessons on logic and critical thinking. Each lesson includes information on objectives, materials, and teaching presentation suggestions. Ten deductive reasoning lessons focus on such topics as fact and opinion, tests for validity of deductive…

Three studies to determine the effects of adult models on interrogative strategies of children (ages 6-11) are reviewed. Two issues are analyzed: (1) the comparative effectiveness of various types of modeling procedures for changing rule-governed behaviors, and (2) the interaction between observational learning and the developmental level of the…

Two experiments which investigated the young child's ability to deal with multiplicative classes and relations (considered behavioral indices of concrete operations thought) in double series and cross class matrices are described and discussed. In the initial study, 160 children from preschool through grade 2 received six matrix subtasks…

This research investigated the use of conditional language by students in fifth, sixth, and seventh grades on four types of tasks, and compared this usage with scores on the Cornell Conditional Reasoning Test (CCRT) and with the ability to recall information. One hundred thirty-two subjects were randomly selected from school populations, and…

The research findings of Siegel, Wohlwill, Goodman, and others suggest that reading is a thinking skill which may be facilitated by the instruction of transferable problem-solving skills. In order to maximize learning in young children, it is important to provide opportunities which allow the exchange of information and concepts from one activity…

Presented in the bibliography is information on approximately 60 commercially distributed instruction materials or programs appropriate for use with handicapped preschool children. Program summaries are grouped into the following categories: gross motor, fine motor, perception, reasoning, language, social, infants, and core (covering three or more…

This paper presents a cross-sectional investigation of adolescents' and young adults' reflective epistemological development. Three groups of 8 subjects (4 male and female) ages 10, 14, and 18 were given Piagetian tasks, the Kohlberg moral judgment questionnaire, and an epistemology interview covering such concepts as knowledge, thought, feeling,…

Analysis of 65 children over a 4-year period on tests of operational and causal thinking offers support for Piaget's notion of stage progression. In kindergarten and grade one, the majority of children in this longitudinal study were between preoperational and the achievement stage of operational thought. By grade two, the majority had attained…

This paper focuses on four studies of pupils' reading comprehension completed at the University of Alberta. A number of investigators have described the acquisition and use of connectives by pupils and have indicated the importance of connectives in the development of abstract logical thinking. (Teachers often consider these words too simple to…

Twenty-one critical essays on the ideas and works of Marshall McLuhan are offered in this review. In the course of the essays, McLuhan is characterized alternately as a genius, an extrapolator, and an oracle; a defender of the choice of choicelessness; a generalizer who rearranges, misinterprets, and misreads the facts to support his theses; an…

This essay examines flaws in the standard hypothetical-deduction inquiry model and offers another quite different model of inquiry, the multiple-completing model, for use in the school classroom. In positing this new model of inquiry the assumption has been made that a pedagogical inquiry model need not necessarily be an accurate reflection of…

The Test of Logical Thinking in Science and tape recordings and notes from a scientific inquiry lesson were used to evaluate the relative effectiveness of the regular and new science programs in developing scientific thinking among elementary school pupils. The findings, limited by sample size and short-term experimental design, indicated that the…

The problem of this research was to construct a list of behaviorally specifiable objectives for secondary school teachers to use in teaching the higher cognitive skills (ie., problem solving, rational thinking, and discovery) as well as subject matter. Process, as contrasted with content, was the focus. The specific Thought Process Objectives are…