Howard Gardner's biggest concern about American students is their lack of genuine understanding--the ability to apply knowledge, skills, and other attainments successfully in new situations. His book "The Unschooled Mind" develops a learning approach based on Piaget's cognitive development theory, Gardner's own multiple intelligences…

Examines problem solving as a central aspect of human intellectuality. Illustrates how students can learn problem solving through instruction in the arts, a part of the curriculum not normally associated with intellectual activity. Describes how a teacher can lead a student or a class through a problem-solving process, deepening the experience in…

Before and after formal instruction, 140 elementary school children answered questions designed to elicit their concept of structural stability. A three-year follow-up showed they tended to retain useful ideas and discard those less useful over time. Their information sources included external as well as school experiences. (SK)

Policies and procedures focusing on students as learners and as agents of their own development should be considered as a new framework for student affairs professionals. Explores the contradictions faced by student affairs professionals and suggests a model for facilitating development of individuals, groups, and the community. (MKA)

Presents a history of the Saturday Evening Girls' Club and other associated library clubs that were developed for immigrant and working-class women and girls in Boston around 1900. Examines the role clubs and social reform organizations played in advancing intellectual, educational, and economic agendas using primary documents. (Contains 111…

Explores two approaches (theoretical representation versus a modeling exercise based on artificial neurological networks) to a problem in organizational design: fitting together constraints making hierarchy advantageous with those favoring organizational learning. The modeling approach expands the scope of traditional theorizing about practice.…

This work provides a correlation study of the role of the following cognitive variables on problem solving in elementary physical chemistry: scientific reasoning (level of intellectual development/developmental level), working-memory capacity, functional mental ("M") capacity, and disembedding ability (i.e., degree of perceptual field…

Although reports calling for middle level schooling reform first appeared in the mid-1970s, change has been slow to come. In Turning Points: Preparing American Youth for the 21st Century (1989), the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development outlined eight essential elements of middle level education. Drawing from the Carnegie Council's…

Author discusses the course that led him to the field of sociology. He argues that sociologists' strength is their immediacy to the subject studied, the social world, and their weakness, sociologists' propensity towards moralism and social ideology. Author advocates detachment for a full understanding of how the social world functions.

Results compiled from several studies indicate that college students place significant personal emphasis on matters related to spirituality. Compiling students' responses from the author's 2003 pilot study, subsequent focus group interviews, and the 2004 national survey, along with faculty's responses from the 2004-2005 Higher Education Research…

Schools are raising standards to improve academic and technical achievement and intellectual growth for all groups of students, particularly at-risk students. This newsletter contains tools and strategies that school leaders and teachers are using successfully to help students meet higher expectations. It organizes the techniques into five…

This review describes the prenatal and postnatal development of the human cortex. Neurogenesis, neuronal migration, dendrite maturation, synaptogenesis, and white matter development are discussed. In addition, the concept of "critical" or "sensitive" periods is discussed as well as genetic and environmental influences (Nature-Nurture). The effects…

This article presents three studies that were designed to map the dimensions involved in "g," with an emphasis of the place of self-awareness in it. The first study involved preschoolers from 3 to 7 years of age. These were examined in three domains (spatial, quantitative and categorical reasoning) with both actual tasks and tasks addressed to the…

This paper seeks to reframe the idea of an educated public as construed by Alasdair MacIntyre in his lecture of 1985. Like MacIntyre, it locates the emergence of an educated public in the Scottish Enlightenment and its universities, but its focus is on aspects which are not brought into focus by MacIntyre's narrative. The paper argues, firstly,…

The connection between sustained high-level critical and creative thought and positive disposition is explored in this paper. The purpose of the paper is three fold: (1) to present the main ideas behind a dispositional conception of thinking; (2) to discuss research on this topic; and (3) to demonstrate the relationship between high-level thinking…