A key to improving urban science and mathematics education is to facilitate the mutual understanding of the participants involved and then look for strategies to bridge differences. Educators need new theoretical tools to do so. In this paper the argument is made that the concept of "boundary spanner" is such a tool. Boundary spanners…

Recent research demonstrates that videogames enhance literacy, attention, reaction time, and higher-level thinking. Several scholars have suggested that massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) such as "Everquest" and "Second Life" have educational potential, but we have little data about what happens when such tools are introduced in the…

Very few elementary public school teachers in the United States expose their students to religion and spirituality in an in-depth way. Even when they have the necessary knowledge base, they shy away from so dangerous an enterprise. They might fear provoking a challenge from parents who are irreligious and are shocked to find religion being…

The central feature of doctoral training in the humanities, according to this author, must remain the organization of curricula to support the mastery of disciplines, the development of rich conceptual frameworks, and a demonstrable attainment of research skills. The work of transmitting these capacities is only partially done by the curriculum. A…

With the exception of a few key writers, counselors largely ignore the benefits that Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Cognitive Psychology (CP) can bring to counseling. It is demonstrated that AI and CP can be integrated into the counseling literature. How AI and CP can offer new perspectives on information processing, cognition, and helping is…

This study, conducted in the Netherlands, examined the effects of a problem-solving program on students' problem-solving and metacognitive skills. The program consisted of four parts involving one or more aspects of problem solving in the content areas of proportions, geometry, numbers, and solving equations and inequalities. The experimental…

An analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) is done to correct for chance differences that occur when subjects are assigned randomly to treatment groups. When properly used, this correction results in adjustment of the group means for pre-existing differences caused by sampling error and reduction of the size of the error variance of the analysis. The…

Special problems confront the researcher measuring the attitudes of young children who cannot readily make cognitive judgments associated with conventional psychometric scales, such as Likert scales. One measurement strategy, called the method of paired comparisons, can overcome these difficulties. The method is explained in this paper. A small…

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how drawings can contribute to generating new information when solvers use drawings in solving mathematical problems. For this purpose, two episodes, in which drawings enabled a solver to find ideas useful for his solutions, were qualitatively and closely analyzed, especially focusing on what roles…

In an attempt to find out more about how creative people engage in thinking, more than 50 men and women considered to be prominant in the humanities, the arts, and the sciences were interviewed. Letters, diaries and autobiographies of other creative individuals were examined in an effort to provide a broad base for studying the psychology of…

Cognitive science is briefly reviewed, and its implications for instructional design are discussed. The application of cognitive science to instruction requires knowledge of cognitive science, the subject content taught, and the system in which the instruction is imbedded. The central concept of cognitive science is mental representation--the…

The paper's purpose is to clarify and develop some theoretical and practical implications of the concept of critical thinking, and the field of social studies is used as one example of the problem. The work of four leading critical theorists (Robert Ennis, Harvey Siegel, Michael Scriven, and R. S. Peters) is described and a distinction is made…

The assumption that people exert considerable cognitive effort in processing incoming information has been complemented in recent years by the idea that people often perform tasks and make decisions after only minimal information processing. Although both the heuristic and systematic conceptualizations of information processing share the…

A paradigmatic model of cultural ideology provides a context for understanding the relationship between decision-making and personal and cultural rationality. Cultural rules or heuristics exist which indicate that many decisions can be made on the basis of established strategy rather than continual analytical calculations. When an optimal solution…

The relationship between analysis of variance (ANOVA) methods and their analogs (analysis of covariance and multiple analyses of variance and covariance--collectively referred to as OVA methods) and the more general analytic case is explored. A small heuristic data set is used, with a hypothetical sample of 20 subjects, randomly assigned to five…