Developing elementary students' critical thinking abilities and cultural awareness through direct instruction is the goal of McRAT (Multicultural Reading and Thinking), a three-year collaboration of teachers and state department reading specialists in seven Arkansas school districts. The program involves direct instruction in thinking strategies…

Teachers at Patapsco Middle School in Howard County, Maryland, are using a process model to help them introduce and then integrate thinking skills in all content areas. The model provides an eight-step framework that enables school systems to incorporate selected thinking skills into their instructional programs. (Author/TE)

Teachers at Bernards High School in Bernardsville, New Jersey, have developed their own approach to the development of thinking skills through a writing program that focuses consecutively on exploration, expression, and refinement of ideas. (TE)

Teachers at the Calverton School in Huntingtown, Maryland, have developed their own K-12 program for teaching thinking through writing in the content areas. (TE)

"Connections" is a program to help teachers infuse thinking strategies such as decision making, problem solving, communicating, and understanding into all subjects. Students work in small groups to apply each strategy to what they are studying, and these strategies are transferable not only between subjects but to the real world. (TE)

Approaches to teaching thinking such as direct teaching of thinking skills and metacognitive approaches, if applied thoughtlessly, can backfire and inhibit thinking, especially with students who are already able, but unconventional, thinkers. We do not know enough about the nature of thinking processes to warrant a mandated thinking skills…

A response to the opinion by John Baer that teaching thinking puts able thinkers at risk. The chances are greater that educators may retreat from teaching thinking if they are uncertain about the importance and possibility thereof than that able students will be harmed by efforts to help them. (Author/TE)

Evidence from the Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) program suggests that at-risk students show little understanding of content without first receiving concentrated instruction in understanding itself. Teaching thinking skills to at-risk students requires a thinking environment, consisting of exploratory conversations, stimulation of curiosity,…

Describes a teaching unit that involves students in reading and analyzing elements of humor in young people's literature. Focuses on what makes quality humorous books funny as well as literary. (FL)

Four different methods of study were presented to fifty-six learning disabled students, who were to learn characteristics of North American minerals. Methods were: (1) direct instruction; (2) mnemonic instruction; (3) reduced-list direct-instruction; and (4) free-study. Results supported findings that learning was superior in the mnemonic…

Tests infants' dual-process performance (a process mediating response decrements called habituation and a state-dependent process mediating response increments called sensitization) on visual habituation-dishabituation tasks. (HOD)

To take advantage of the emerging technological revolution, education must undertake its own revolution. Otherwise, technology will never be successfully integrated into the curriculum and may effect change without improvement. Primary focus must be on the future of curriculum and instruction, particularly discipline-specific process skills and…

Engineering education is viewed as the development of the quality of thinking in students, and the implications of this approach for student assessment are discussed. (MSE)

Considers nature of learning; significance of promoting learning rather than teaching; active nature of learning from experience; role of simulations and games in promoting learning; process of debriefing and its relationship to reflection; and teacher role. The Learning System, which relates general systems theory to process of learning, is…

Reviews the history of research designed to determine the effects of media upon the learning process and the ways that learners utilize media to perceive and process information. Research methodologies are discussed, theories developed over the past decade are presented, and directions for further research are suggested. (LRW)