It is commonly assumed that psychologists studying human reasoning may safely ignore the normative issue of rationality, and that philosophers may analyze rationality without reference to empirical research on actual human reasoning. Presenting five arguments against such a mutually exclusive dichotomy, this paper concludes that although empirical…

A color-blot exercise is described as a way of getting students involved in abstract thinking by a low risk, confidence-building activity. Students are asked to combine poetry and art. (CL)

The difficulty and the beauty of Chinese lies in the simultaneous concreteness and ambiguity of each graph. (Author)

As analytic philosophy shows no sign of being abandoned or superseded in the English-speaking world, the prospects of continued conceptual clarification of nonphilosophical disciplines must be regarded as highly favorable at this point in time. (60 references) (Author/MM)

A review of The Development of the Concept of Space in the Child by Monique Laurendeau and Adrien Pinard. (dS)

A scientific definition of the meaning of human creative thought is pursued. (JD)

Students (n = 328) from US and UK universities completed four self-report measures related to intellectual competence: typical intellectual engagement (TIE), openness to experience, self-assessed intelligence (SAI), and learning approaches. Confirmatory data reduction was used to examine the structure of TIE and supported five major factors:…

This paper raises serious questions about the reliability of the learning pyramid as a guide to retention among students. The pyramid suggests that certain teaching methods are connected with a corresponding hierarchy of student retention. No specific credible research was uncovered to support the pyramid, which is loosely associated with the…

SystemC is a system-level design and simulation language based on C++. We've been using SystemC for computer organization and design projects for the past several years. Because SystemC is embedded in C++ it contains the powerful abstraction mechanisms of C++ not found in traditional hardware description languages, such as support for…

The manual on problem solving was culled from a set of newspaper articles in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Each brief article typically suggests problem solving strategies and offers sample problems on which to test one's skill. Articles are organized into the categories of input, process, and output. The input section offers ideas about analysis,…

Article explores some of the key notions of the construct "concept" from the psychological and educational literature in order to demonstrate the need for standardization of definition and a more unified front in future investigations involving this important element in the study of cognition. (Author)

The article reviews six conceptions of genius and offers a seventh. Three types of genius (analytic, synthetic, and integrated) are defined. Common to all three is the sustained ability to use analysis and synthesis (i.e., to be both linear and creative in approaching complex problems). (Author/DB)

A training program in analogical reasoning skills stresses processes of encoding, inferring, mapping, and applying. Initial sessions focus on applications to concrete analogy problems while subsequent sessions present more abstract linguistic analogies and consider applications to other school subjects. (CL)