A distinction can be made between the term "creativity" and creative thinking skills. Creativity typically refers to a talent for original and masterful production in the arts and sciences, and there is scant evidence that teachers have any influence on creativity of this kind. Creative thinking refers to a group of six thinking skills that if…

Research supported by the U.S. Office of Education, Project No. 8-B-002, Grant OEG-0-8-080002-0220-010

This paper argues that a major aspect of intelligence is the ability to solve problems and that careful analysis of problem-solving behavior is a means of specifying many of the psychological processes that make up intelligence. The focus is on the mechanisms involved when, in the absence of complete instruction, a person must "invent" a new…

A review of the research literature concerning the effects of cooperation and competition on small-group productivity suggests that results have been conflicting and inconclusive. From a methodological standpoint, the inconsistent finings result from the use of experimental tasks which create systematic bias in favor of either the cooperative or…

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…

Survey feedback and problem solving processes can be applied to increase the effectiveness of task-oriented structural approaches to educational organization development. One such approach involves the superimposition of complementary collective decision structures over the existing authority decision framework of the school. Collective decision…

Two studies are reported in which the relative difficulty of the utilization of two response strategies, matching and oddity, was assessed. Subjects for the first study were children ages 5-7, 8-10, and 11-13 years; in the second study, college adults were tested. Generally, subjects took more trials to learn matching problems than oddity…

E. Paul Torrance's Instructional Model uses an integrated approach to teach thinking skills and creative productivity along with subject content for gifted students. Thinking skill objectives include such skills as developing originality, keeping open, imagining the future, using movement, etc. Two sample lessons apply the model to creative…

Current syllabi and textbooks, in trying to cover every important idea, trivialize them all. The Coalition of Essential Schools believes that students will learn more if teachers are allowed to cover less. The advantages of a slower, thought-provoking curriculum, and recommendations for designing one, are provided. (BJV)

John Dewey's theory of reflective thought as presented in "How We Think" (1983) was analyzed. Components and relationships in the processes of reflective thought and teaching people to think effectively were identified. Implications of the research are discussed. (Author/RM)

The Cognitive Approaches to School Leadership (CASL) Project builds on cognitive-science theories of how people think about problems, with special reference to related studies of administrative practice in general and educational administration in particular. This paper is the second of two papers that reports findings from clinical studies of…

In modern society, a company's competitive advantage is directly related to its capacity for product development. This paper describes the use of a Model Integrated Factory to simulate product development business processes for the education of engineers. (WRM)

Research on levels of questioning and their effects on learning is reviewed. It is shown that higher level questions facilitate reproductive and productive knowledge, but the reasons why are not clearly understood. An information processing model which accounts for question level effects is discussed. (MH)

Finds that various aspects of formal reasoning correlated significantly with mean t-unit lengths written by high school freshman boys, but not by freshman girls. Suggests that the reasoning tasks may have been biased against females. (RL)

This paper discusses a multicomponent approach to assessment of productive thinking with gifted students. It presents a model of productive thinking encompassing creative and critical thinking, problem solving, and decision making. Emphasis is on planning/profiling, instruction, evaluation, and documentation. Profiling, performance assessment,…