Any consideration of basic skills must at some point achieve the realization that a fundamental skill is the ability of the mind to create, produce, and utilize meaning. The purpose of productive and creative thinking is to know and understand, to produce and utilize meaning that serves to guide and direct mental and physical behavior. The overall…

A student of affective education describes how she helped her 8-year-old son express and discharge negative feelings resulting from the family's relocation to a new home in an unfamiliar city. Together mother and son made a book about the move. The mother designed a sequence of exercises stimulating right hemispheric, creative, and intuitive…

Some central issues in discussions of creative processes in science are: (1) the mechanism(s) by which hypothesis formation takes place; (2) the sources of new knowledge during hypothesis formation; and (3) the "Eureka" versus steady accumulation (accretion) issue concerning the pace of change during hypothesis formation. This paper…

This paper examines motivation in elementary and secondary schools and discusses its relationship to critical and creative thinking, student decisionmaking, future trends, and mass media. It is suggested that thinking is an important consideration in teaching students and that there is a relationship between student thinking and motivation.…

This paper examines the teaching of thinking skills for the future. An analysis of John Dewey's "How We Think" offers insights into cognition. Four types of thinking--reflective, conceptual, critical and creative--are explored. Aspects of brain research relevant to cognition are discussed. Specific ways to facilitate thinking and several…

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…

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…

A human systems approach that emphasizes knowing the parts of a phenomenon, their order, and particularly their interactions needs to be adopted by industrial arts. A student-based theoretical framework that incorporates systems and subsystems in industrial arts has been presented by Donald Maley. The theoretical base includes 10 organismic…

This paper discusses the central theoretical aspects of the "Languaging in the Content Areas" (LICA) thesis, intended to provide postelementary reading with a sense of definition and purpose compatible with contemporary needs and conditions. The objective of the LICA thesis is not merely to teach students how to read critically what has been…

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

Remedial readers may be given opportunities to be creative through three approaches: inventiveness games, branched fiction, and pantomime and creative dramatics. Inventiveness games can stimulate creative thinking and serve as a launching pad for creative writing activities. In branched fiction, the story works up to a cliffhanger situation and…

The intent of this paper is to provide geography educators and researchers with insights into creating a "geography of the future." Among the insights of major interest to geographers (including students, teachers, researchers, and other professional geographers) are that altered states of consciousness (such as often brought on by hallucinogens)…

An advanced learning center for gifted students from the third through the eighth grade is described. The goal of this program is to provide children who have leadership potential with a curricular environment that allows opportunities to probe, experiment, hypothesize, synthesize, and analyze in order to act and interact with others. This same…

A two-week writing workshop has been designed and conducted for gifted students in grades three through five. Specific activities have been planned to enable learners to write for a variety of purposes, to learn about many categories of writing, and to come into contact with different kinds of information through listening, discussion, and reading…