This paper focuses specifically on the reasoning skill called proportional reasoning. Areas addressed include: (1) a definition (providing examples of direct and indirect proportional reasoning); (2) the development of proportional reasoning (discussing survey results of students logical reasoning abilities); (3) planning for the future (proposing…

Order Analysis is a multidimensional scaling (MDS) technique for determining order among items. This paper reviews articles by different authors describing various components of ordering theory. A common nomenclature is constructed to link together the various ideas and is applied to a fairly simple set of data. Topics discussed include a more…

This monograph, first in a series of six, provides the theoretical background and premises underlying the efforts of the research team and two collaborating California school districts to explore ways in which the computer and related technologies can be more fully and effectively used in the instruction of learning disabled students. Contents…

General theory of transfer of knowledge and skill in learning second languages and ways in which language awareness may contribute to second language learning are examined. It is concluded that while recent second language acquisition research work and theories do not support or refute transfer of general language principles to the learning of…

Following some years of eclipse by the basics, imparting thinking ability to students is once again emerging as the primary goal of public education. How to teach thinking skills, is, however, subject to question. For example, not only is the domain of the higher order skills broad and imprecisely specified, there is also considerable naivete in…

Researchers in medicine, education, and related fields continue to make new discoveries about how the brain functions or malfunctions. The implications of studies of how young children learn compare favorably with those of educators such as Maria Montessori, Jerome Bruner, and Jean Piaget. These researchers saw growth and development as a series…

A study investigated the relationship between prior knowledge, age, instruction, and the relative difficulty and importance of a text in the reading processes and knowledge acquisition of elementary school children in Belgium. Two groups of 42 students (10 and 12 year olds) were given a knowledge questionnaire two months prior to the experimental…

An earlier study showed that responses are remembered better when subjects produce them from cues, than when subjects read cue-response pairs. The decided memory advantage for generated targets relative to read ones is known as the generation effect. The present research is designed to study the generation effect for cues, following a…

The expert-novice paradigm, which demonstrates the outstanding role of domain-specific knowledge in explaining differences in memory behavior and performance, was examined. Two studies are described which compared memory performance of groups equivalent with regard to domain-specific knowledge but differing in intellectual ability. The hypothesis…

An overview is provided of the principles of cognitive psychology that can be used to enhance the effectiveness of computer-assisted instruction (CAI). First, the paper looks at the features of classical and operant conditioning that provide the foundation for important parts of mastery learning and CAI programs. Next, findings from four areas of…

Scholars from varied disciplines--first language (L1) acquisition, second language (L2) acquisition, composition research, and cognitive psychology--have found a high level of permeability in their search for more effective classroom models of writing instruction. Among the most influential work in this area has been Stephen Krashen's theory of L2…

This monograph contains reports of research conducted under the Higher Order Thinking Program of Research at the Minnesota Research and Development Center. A report entitled "Studying Expertise in Specific Knowledge Domains" (Ruth G. Thomas) briefly reviews previous findings regarding the general nature of expertise and discusses the…

To investigate the factors determining why some children succeed at certain intellectual tasks while others of equal or near equal IQ, age, and motivation are unable to master the same task, 145 female and 144 male eighth grade students were administered "An Inventory of Piaget's Developmental Tasks" (IPDT). Labeled as concrete,…

Intended to lend organization to the educational media research in visual perception and learning with line drawings, this paper reviews studies that cut across several specialized fields of education and psychology. The studies reviewed are arranged into the following categories: (1) learning from visuals, (2) abstract versus realism theories,…

The movement away from a stimulus-response to a constructive view of memory and reading comprehension has had an impact on both reading research and teaching. Viewing memory as not simply the recollection of sensory data, but as the complex interaction of the sensory experience with its immediate context and the perceiver's previous knowledge,…