Educators can identify children's strengths early on and gain insight into each student's unique abilities by using the numerous ideas and informal assessments in this exciting guide. Gifted and talented specialist Ann Maccagnano offers K-8 teachers challenging activities and engaging lessons to develop and nurture gifted learners' talents.…

More than 20 years ago, A Nation At Risk warned that "a rising tide of mediocrity" threatened the U.S. education system and that the United States would be unable to effectively compete with other economies because of a scarcity of graduates in science and technology. In 2001, No Child Left Behind reiterated that message, pushing through…

Combining both the Western perspective of creativity as productivity and the Eastern perspective of creativity as enlightenment, a Program for Enlightened and Productive Creativity (PEPC) for teaching inquiry was devised. The PEPC describes stages through which a student is guided to solve a problem using increasingly complex observation, inquiry,…

In the light of significant changes in contemporary society that demand high level thinking skills of professional workers, this monograph explores the nature of independent thinking and principles of teaching independent thinking, particularly to college freshmen. A section on independent thinking outlines abstract, creative, and systematic…

Whether the aim has been to understand the nature of creativity or to determine its development, researchers have formulated a number of measures of creativity. A glut of results and conclusions actually hinders an educational understanding of the term creativity. The most widely known tests of creativity incorporate divergent-thinking, as opposed…

The preliminary findings of the evaluation of the training program, Creative Problem Solving, are presented. The training was provided through the Blumberg Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Special Education at Indiana State University. Twenty-one state and county child service coordinators participated in the training on a voluntary basis.…

Recognizing that children need enrichment at home, this book offers hundreds of unusual ways for kids and parents to spend time together. It also demonstrates the fun people can have while learning, and the learning that goes on while having fun. Using this book as a guide, parents and children can survey new subjects ranging from cultural…

In most schools in America little attention is paid to the nurturance of students' creative potential, with emphasis too often placed instead on rote, repetitive learning. The literature contains many suggestions for enhancing creativity in the classroom setting, such as refraining from discounting odd or unusual questions from students, finding…

Prepared as part of a series applying recent research in oral and written communication instruction to classroom practice, this booklet examines the language interaction that takes place between student and teacher and between student and student whenever a geniune dialogue about an important event or problem occurs. The first section of the…

This collection of essays, which evolved from the Professional Lecture Series on Teaching and Learning and Instructional Workshops on Teaching and Learning held at the University of Colorado (Boulder), addresses a variety of styles and situations for teaching and learning. The following essays are included: (1) "Teaching as Architecture:…

This study tested the effectiveness of having fifth-grade students generate their own examples of selected concepts on energy. Hypotheses were that subjects would perform better on sections of a test related to definitions and recognition of exemplars of the concepts for which they found their own examples than on sections related to comparible…

This international research report consists of five papers discussing five different topics in education. "Views on the Implementation of the Curriculum--Experiences of the Finnish Practice" (P. Kansanen) analyzes research results regarding the national curriculum for the Finnish comprehensive school system and compares them with a…

The critical and creative thinking dispositions which are intrinsic to children's critical thought may reflect the standards of an adult culture which values verbalized thought over other kinds of human intelligence. Primary critical and creative thinking dispositions are those which help the child explore the world. These are biological processes…

Concentrating on strategies for processing information, this guide provides a collection of models and techniques appropriate for differentiating the content and instructional procedures in the classroom, and is designed for use with intermediate academically talented students. The guide is divided into four sections--Differentiated Questioning,…

The approach to writing as a process of problem-solving through experimentation is used in a sentence-expansion technique for college-level remedial English. Students are presented with an uninteresting, two-sentence story that they expand by experimentation, building confidence in their knowledge of appropriate sentence structure and grammar. The…