Transfer of learning is one of the major purposes of education. Theories and research have tried hard to answer questions such as: how does transfer occur? and how is transfer enhanced? Situated cognitive theory and research about anchored instruction together bring some positive findings. Anchored instruction provides the learner with a situated,…

The roles of impersonal (or abstract) and relational (or connected) modes of knowing in the experiences of young adults were studied, and the ways the two converge are described in this report of the post-college phase of a 7-year longitudinal study of the epistemological development of college students, i.e., their assumptions about the limits,…

Between 1985 and 1988 eight colleges implemented a "Thinking Across the Curriculum" program and a procedure for assessing the impact of the program on the cognitive development and thinking skills of students. One hundred and twenty faculty members participated in the project and approximately 1,800 students studied in courses developed…

This report describes the "Differential Coursework Patterns (DCP) Project," which developed the Cluster Analytic Model (CAM) to look at effects of different patterns of college coursework on the general learned abilities of students as determined by such measures as the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) General Test. The model looks for…

Hypothesizing that severely language delayed children lack sufficient understanding of causal structure to comprehend stories, a reading program concentrated on developing the causal reasoning of 10 children between the ages of 10 and 12 with a verbal intelligence quotient two to three years below average. Instructional activities in the…

The theme of the conference reported on here was school reform and related issues. An introductory statement, "Thoughts on School Reform," by Jerome Bruner, and a list of conference participants are followed by a group of papers on education and politics. The papers are "Reform and Partnership in Education," by Albert Shanker;…

In this discussion of ethics instruction in a distance education course the question is raised of how to develop a "fit" between the objectives of a course and the strategy for instruction, interaction, and evaluation. The paper discusses specific problems confronting distance education course planners. First, while the objectives of…

This digest considers the role of personal computers in the education of gifted students. There is evidence that students are working "smarter," whether they are learning and using more information, understanding key concepts and relationships better, or developing higher level thinking skills. Research findings concerning the specific…

This study investigated the development of students' abilities to integrate information in stories as an aspect of reading comprehension. Students aged 8, 11, 14, and 18 judged the importance of key statements, which varied in their causal relations within an episode, between episodes, and in a higher-order structure, yielding three levels of…

This paper discusses ways that students can better be taught to think. It argues that poor/low-achieving students served by Chapter 1 of the Education Consolidation and Improvement Act of 1981 could genuinely profit from instruction on thinking and that, for maximum impact, such instruction should be introduced as a course in itself, separate from…

Assumptions have been made about the growth and development of reasoning and communicating skills in college. This study describes a standardized set of assessments of reasoning, writing and speaking with norms for freshmen and seniors and multiple equated forms. The study provides evidence of the validity and reliability of these assessments.…

This paper reports a multi-method approach for examining the cognitive level of multiple-choice items used in a medical pathology course at a large midwestern medical school. Analysis of the standard item analysis data and think-out-loud reports of a sample of students completing a 66 item examination were used to test assumptions related to the…

Sixty-five Year 2 children with ages ranging from six to seven years participated in a teaching experiment to introduce functional thinking. The results show that young children are capable of generalising, can provide examples of relations and functions, can describe the inverse of such relationships and give valid reasons for how they found the…

This study compares the critical-reading strategies of 83 good and 72 poor sixth-grade readers and 96 good and 67 poor eighth-grade readers. After reading seven brief passages on social studies and science topics, the students responded to 42 statements that required either the ability to pull facts together and make conclusions based on unstated…

The idea that the brain may be more complex and varied in the ways that it responds to and interprets information than is generally recognized suggests that both the left and right hemispheres are in need of total development. In discussing the development of curriculum that will bring into harmony the functions of both brain hemispheres, it is…