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…

Research has suggested that the two hemispheres of the brain serve specialized functions, with the most recent studies portraying the left hemisphere as processing information in a linear, serial, or sequential manner and the right hemisphere as processing information in a holistic, concrete, or visual mode. Although few systematic studies have…

Because understanding pictures is a significant aid to readers, this paper explores research on picture interpretation. The paper describes the complexity of the process and states that the ability to interpret pictures seems to proceed from the simple to the complex: from concrete experiences with pictures to the abstract interpretation of…

This document reorts on an educational research study involving 75 eighth-grade students to determine the effects of problem solving instruction on the ability of students to apply proportional reasoning in problem situations. Results suggest that changes in basic reasoning skills such as proportional reasoning are long term, highly dependent on…

Children in grades 1, 3, and 5 and college students were given a variety of judgment tasks contrasting the comparison of quantity with the comparison of proportions to determine whether the understanding of proportions develops before formal operations. Results indicated that the comprehension of abstract relations requires formal operations.…

Previous studies have found that an object can be categorized faster at a basic level (hammer) than at either a subordinate (club hammer) or a superordinate level (tool). While some attribute this result to basic categories having more distinctive attributes, other factors might cause this result. For example, basic categories routinely have…

Conducted to extend a series of earlier aptitude treatment interaction studies in the area of mathematics learning, this study was designed to determine if spatial and general reasoning abilities interact with instructional treatment. The aptitudes used included spatial and general reasoning ability. One hundred and twenty students enrolled in…

Information about individuals' representations of problems was obtained from studies on reasoning and problem categorization. College students (N=62) participated in a study of the transition from concrete to formal reasoning using the pendulum and chemical yellow tasks. Over a 10-12 week period, 47 students participated in 10 training sessions on…