The field of education has largely ignored the concept of the dialectic, except in the Socratic teaching method, and even there bipolar meaning or reasoning has not been recognized. Mainstream educational psychology bases its assumptions about human reasoning and learning on current demonstrative concepts of information processing and levels of…

To determine the impact of causal relationships and shared features in the use of analogy, subjects in two separate studies were informed of the behavior of six members of a little known primitive tribe and asked to make predictions on the behavior of additional tribe members based on their perceived similarities with the original group. Results…

Sixty adolescents, stratified by sex and grade level (i.e., 9th, 12th, and college sophomore) participated in an examination of Piaget's suggestion that the formal operations are prerequisite to the development of political idealism, abstract thought and future time perspective in adolescence. Analysis of the cognition data revealed that the…

The author discusses the therapeutic mechanisms in group therapy. After considering the views of three authors, the following four mechanisms seem to be accepted generally: ventilation, acceptance, spectator therapy and intellectualization. (SE)

This study investigated the emergence of combinatorial competence in early adolescence and the effectiveness of a programmed discovery training procedure. Significant increases in combinatorial skill with age were shown; it was found that the expression of this skill was significantly facilitated if problems involved concrete material of low…

Intended for college instructors interested in promoting and developing intellectual abilities in their students, this publication details the Perry and Toulmin models of cognitive development. The first section explains the Perry model of dualistic students, who are comfortable in a framework of absolute knowledge and unquestionable right and…

A technique to teach cognitive skills to directly facilitate abstract and rational thinking is described. Based on George Kelly's theory of personal constructs, his Role Construct Repertory Test has students construe similarities and differences among important course concepts rather than provide individual definitions or examples of those…

The foundations of knowledge by tradition have been treated analytically, and knowledge has been characterized as a theoretical subject. This article introduces a steering mechanism as the prerequisite for a study of knowledge work and maintenance on empirical grounds. Knowledge is treated synthetically, that is, as something that exists only…

Systematic observations of thousands of high school students in the California Mentally Gifted Minors/Gifted and Talented Education programs identified five principles underlying the development of high level thinking skills in this population: (1) Exceptional performance on any criterion requires mutually reinforcing antecedents, the effects of…

This paper is concerned with the importance of argumentation in the classroom, especially in relation to the social sciences. Issues of argument and argument evaluation are considered. The paper analyzes the nature of such reasoning and indicates its importance in subject matter learning. Three situations are described in the paper in which…

The basic premise of this paper is that effective teacher training programs need to assist students in reaching beyond competence in subject matter and instructional methodology to focus on developing the prospective teacher's capacity to recognize and utilize the cognitive processes underlying the respective categories of the curriculum. A…

This paper examines the area of teachers' practical arguments (arugments consisting in the search for a plan of action), considering questions such as: How does rationality manifest itself in practice, and in specific human practices like teaching? Is practical reasoning in teaching moral? Do values of theoretical reasoning, such as universality,…

Eighteen naval fire technicians served as subjects in a study using scenarios to simulate a real world task for assessing the readability of general technical texts. The scenario asked subjects to read a segment of text and to explain to a colleague how the particular component described in the passage functioned. Subjects' summaries were assessed…

The study is described which examined quantitative and qualitative differences among learning disabled (LD) subgroups and between LD and normal Ss in reasoning and problem solving behaviors. The research strategy involved (1) detailed analyses of the behavior of subgroups of LD adolescents and of matched normal achieving adolescents in a task…

Recently, a number of studies have reported a high correlation between the supposedly separate traits described as integrated science process skills and formal reasoning ability. The implication has been that these two constructs are different but related. Further implications have been made that a treatment to enhance one "trait" might…