Over the past few years evidence-based practice has become of central concern to health and social services in this country. The fundamental tenant is that there must be a clear link between professional practice and its research base. This paper outlines the concept of evidence-based practice and how it rests on the concept of good quality…

The current work examined age differences in the classification of novel object images that vary in continuous dimensions of structural shape. The structural dimensions employed are two that share a privileged status in the visual analysis and representation of objects: the shape of discrete prominent parts and the attachment positions of those…

The evolution of contemporary cities into solar cities will be affected by the decisions of countless specialists according to an established intellectual and professional division of labor. These specialists belong to groups responsible for advancing and applying a body of knowledge, and jointly, these bodies of knowledge make up a knowledge…

Recent federal initiatives and efforts within education and psychology professional organizations have contributed to an increased focus on scientifically based practices in education. Although interventions are available to educators, there is a need to enhance systems capacity through identification, selection, and implementation of appropriate…

Spearman's "Law of Diminishing Returns" states that the g saturation of a test is greater for individuals with lower, rather than higher, test scores, and that it decreases with age. A common methodological problem in testing Spearman's "Law of Diminishing Returns" with respect to ability differentiation is how to create the…

Scholars in the field of communication theory and research have ignored and problematized the relationship between sign and meaning. This paper discusses the relationship in order to catalogue the different positions taken and to investigate the work that gets done from these positions. In the "brute sense data" or physicalist position, the…

This research focused on preservice elementary teachers' understanding and reconstruction of understanding about multiplication in the domain of fractions. At the start of the study, 44% of the 50 preservice teachers studied reported that they had a method for reasoning about multiplication with fractions, and 28% were able to describe a situation…

The challenge to the dominance of rationality in educational philosophy presented by John Dewey and Donald Schon is examined in this paper. The paper identifies basic assumptions of their perspective and explains concepts of reflective thinking, which include biography, context of uncertainty, and "not-yet." A model of reflective thought…

This paper expands on schematic theory through a review of recent work in the field of semiotics. Content and formal schemata are shown to be grounded respectively in perceptual (abductive) and indexical (inductive) strategies of inference. A third kind of schemata is based on deductive generalization and referred to as abstract schemata. All…

One principal's criterion for proper decision-making information may be much different from that of another. Information providers need to decide what constitutes relevant information when communicating to decision-makers. Fifty-three principals and 11 assistant principals were administered two indicator tests to investigate the relationship…

This project addressed the question: What knowledge and processes enable individuals to construct and modify representations of novel, nonroutine problems? The theoretical goal was to extend the information-processing theory of problem solving to include processes that have been characterized as restructuring of problems and productive thinking by…

A study examined whether word processing amplifies writing performance and whether it restructures the process of writing. Sixteen college students wrote a short essay in a single session on either a word processor or in longhand. The quality of the essays was assessed by trained judges who rated their content and style. Text analysis methods were…

Two divergent approaches to a prison educational program attempt to go beyond accreditation or amusement and address instead attitude change, human choice, judgment, and empowerment. The first, most obvious approach, focuses on the provision of knowledge. The second approach starts with a focus on individual development. Its aim is to facilitate…

This paper describes the Structure-Mapping Engine (SME), a cognitive simulation program for studying human analogical processing. SME is based on Gentner's Structure-Mapping theory of analogy, and provides a "tool kit" for constructing matching algorithms consistent with this theory. This flexibility enhances cognitive simulation studies by…

Students and instructors may be frustrated with students' lack of understanding of sociological concepts. We suggest that the difficulty of teaching and learning sociology is that sociological concepts and relationships require the use of abstract reasoning patterns. Many students are unaccustomed to using these abstract reasoning patterns. We use…