Conversations of British 7-year olds and Canadian 11-year olds were analyzed to establish 3 criteria for assessing oracy in classroom situations: ideation (quality of information and its validation); interpersonal (sensitivity of relationships with listeners); and textual (choice and organization of words). Differences between the two groups point…

Presents a matrix for writing business memos and describes how it helps students organize memos that are logically complete, internally consistent, and coherent. (SR)

Illustrates the game-theory concept of a dominant strategy using the MTV-network game show "Singled Out." Describes how the game show works and why this makes it attractive as an example of strategic behavior. Presents examples of how the show is used in class. (DSK)

Shows how the logical framework may be used to provide a structure for gender mainstreaming within organizations. Experiences of Makere University, Uganda, show that the logical framework can be used for planning and for monitoring progress during implementation. (SLD)

Reports on two studies that use new tasks to compare English children's use of strategies that reverse the order of addends in solving addition problems. Shows that knowledge of commutativity among young children is widespread, but does not establish a direct link between this knowledge and children's choice of addition strategies. (DSK)

Discusses differences between young peoples' perspectives of the social world and those offered by social science. Summarizes the economic thinking of young people and argues that economics presents students with an important perspective for social analysis. Provides three "economic mysteries" that introduce economic principles into the classroom.…

Noveck (2001) argued that children even as old as 11 do not reliably endorse a scalar interpretation of weak scalar terms ("some", "might", "or") (cf. Braine & Rumain, 1981; Smith, 1980). More recent studies suggest, however, that children's apparent failures may depend on the experimental demands (Papafragou…

We explored how relational complexity and featural distraction, as varied in scene analogy problems, affect children's analogical reasoning performance. Results with 3- and 4-year-olds, 6- and 7-year-olds, 9- to 11-year-olds, and 13- and 14-year-olds indicate that when children can identify the critical structural relations in a scene analogy…

This paper engages with questions of logic and its politics to explore how those of us in early childhood education can become critical consumers of "brain research". The research truths we use to construct classroom practices decide the meanings of our actions, thoughts and feelings and our interactions with children. Following Foucault (1980), I…

Changes in strategic behavior were examined in older married couples participating in a cognitive intervention study. Participants were randomly assigned to: Questionnaire Control, Individual Training, or Collaborative Training. Trained participants completed inductive reasoning training sessions at home individually or as a couple. Participants…

This article compares the experiences of small groups of newly qualified teachers before and after the introduction of statutory induction in England in 1999. It examines how far some of the beneficial outcomes of a structured induction programme advocated by Glickman and Bay (1990) have been evidenced by the experiences of the post-induction…

This article applies the logic of the improved school finance, arguing the need to understand how resources are used at the school and classroom levels. While California policies and most court cases have been seriously inadequate from this perspective, the recent case of Williams v. California provides new opportunities for equity since it…

Inferences about spatial, temporal, and other relations are ubiquitous. This article presents a novel model-based theory of such reasoning. The theory depends on 5 principles. (a) The structure of mental models is iconic as far as possible. (b) The logical consequences of relations emerge from models constructed from the meanings of the relations…

This study investigated how 4- to 7-year-old children's second-order belief attribution might be facilitated by either reducing information processing or varying the sequence of task questions. In Experiment 1, compared with Perner and Wimmer's (1985) original second-order false-belief task, a new task with reduced information-processing demands…

The study we present tries to explore how first year engineering students formulate hypotheses in order to construct their own problem solving structure when confronted with problems in physics. Under the constructivistic perspective of the teaching-learning process, the formulation of hypotheses plays a key role in contrasting the coherence of…