One possible approach students can cope with abstract algebra concepts is reducing abstraction. This notion occurs when learners are unable to adopt mental strategies as they deal with abstraction level of a given task. To make these concepts mentally accessible for themselves, learners unconsciously reduce the level of the abstraction of the…

Piaget's studies clearly highlight two qualitative advances made during the preoperational period. The first is the breakthrough of representational intelligence, beginning around 2 years of age. The second is the emergence of coordinated representational thought, beginning around 4 years of age. This paper focuses on the second advance, which…

Clinical semiotics is defined and discussed as the discipline having to do with the interrelation between specifically human methods of communicating and processing information and specifically human psychiatric and psychosomatic disorders. (Author/RM)

It is the aim of this paper to make a few suggestions concerning the application of the epistemological apparatus as developed by Edmund Husserl and his successors to one section within the area of art - namely, imaginative literature. (Author)

A study investigating developmental differences in the ability to reason with conditional propositions used five variations of Wason's selection task to assess conditional reasoning in 132 eighth, tenth, and twelfth grade adolescents. In addition to examining developmental differences, the study had as an objective to examine the role of semantic…

Schemata, as defined recently by reading researchers, represent generic concepts which are stored in memory. They include underlying objects, situations, events, actions, and sequences of actions for use in interpreting new experiences. Research on schemata suggests that teachers need to pay attention to the types of questions they ask when…

Educators generally assume that questioning promotes learning and that higher level questions do so better than lower level questions. But there are a number of problems with these assumptions. First, the classification of questions as higher level or lower level is ambiguous. The distinction is confused by such issues as non-controversial…

Advocates and teachers of critical thinking tend to deny that intuition and justification are logical, even though they assume that both processes are rational. However, it can be demonstrated that the relation between intuition and inference, between justification and explanation, is dialectical and complementary, so that there is no mystery as…

Arguing that understanding what lies behind the apparent usability of direct manipulation style interfaces might not only help in building better interfaces, but can also draw attention to possible side effects, this paper uses examples from a prototype data manipulation system to pursue a characterization of direct manipulation interfaces as…

Practical example of need for more in-depth study of debate theory. (CH)

This paper reports two studies designed to investigate the relationship between conceptions of distributive justice and perspective taking in preschool children. Subjects in the first study were 39 white, middle-class 4- and 5-year-old children. They were administered a concrete object form and an abstract picture form of a perceptual role-taking…

The effect of using either abstract or concrete words on verbal problem solving was examined in this study. Twelve undergraduate students in each of two conditions mentally solved identically structured problems by reordering and chaining together previously memorized pairs of words. Subjects who received concrete words both memorized the word…

The increasing abstractness of our language makes it difficult to deal effectively with concrete social problems. (JH)

Analogical models can be powerful aids to reasoning, as when light is explained in terms of water waves; or they can be misleading, as when chemical processes are thought of in terms of life processes such as putrefaction. This paper proposes a structural characterization of good science analogy using a theoretical approach in which complex…