This report documents events and activities that took place in the course of meetings and seminars investigating the cognitive processes and learning styles of elementary school teachers. The report includes an overview and six separate documents, each presenting one facet of the project. The overview is followed in section two by a proposed…

This study showed that war does have an appeal to both men and women, but that appeal is different and is related to the set of moral concerns that are unique to each gender. To assess the different aspects of men's and women's attitudes towards war, a 48-item Likert-type scale was constructed and administered to 148 students. Results showed that…

It is becoming increasingly important to teach students higher-order thinking skills in addition to mere factual knowledge. Recent scientific and technological advances offer significant opportunities to implement more effective teaching of these skills. By investigating intellectual processes, cognitive science has led to a significantly better…

In the fall of 1980, a course titled Developing Critical Thinking Skills was approved at the University of Minnesota-Duluth for offering as one of the options in the liberal education category called Communication, Language, and Symbolic Systems. This paper provides a description of the course (designed to provide experiences with methods and…

This pamphlet reviews five reports that highlight an emerging consensus among researchers about the value of systematically incorporating cognitive instruction into the elementary school curriculum. First is a comprehensive framework by Robert J. Marzano and C. L. Hutchins for an integrated approach to thinking skills that has been developed and…

One formal operational schema, hypothetical-deductive reasoning, is seen as most important to effective decisionmaking in planning and carrying out classroom lessons. While it is clear that formal thought schema are widely used in teaching, it is also understood that these reasoning schema are themselves dependent upon the more fundamental…

The relationship between characteristics of academic disciplines and intellectual traits of undergraduates was studied. Subject matter areas were structurally reflected in the university as department or major field groupings. A total of 2,278 students, graduating in either 1969-1970 or 1979-1980, were administered the 14 scales of the Omnibus…

A discussion is presented of the philosophy undergirding the 5-year teacher education program at the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia. In this program, students can earn a baccalaureate degree from the university and a Master of Teaching degree from the Curry School. The program seeks to produce teachers who are effective…

This study investigated the relationships between the online searching behavior of novice searchers and three measures of learning style--the Learning Style Inventory (LSI), the Remote Association Test (RAT), and the Symbolic Reasoning Test (SRT). The three tests were administered to 76 graduate students during the first class meeting of a…

An examination of the reasons behind the strong evidence that practice in sentence combining leads to overall superiority in writing began with the development of a more precise syntactic instrument than had been used previously and a new set of criteria for rhetorical analysis which focused on unity, organization, succinctness, and cohesiveness.…

The focus of this paper is on some of the difficulties students experience in learning from texts and in solving other types of academic problems, because of their failure to distinguish between skills needed for everyday thinking and those needed for academic thinking. The paper discusses the types of processing problems children experience when…

In teaching people to think, a theory is needed about the thought process and about how it is modified by intervention. Most approaches to training people to think focus on an intermediary or mediating process. To explore the effectiveness of a group support training method in modifying cognitive style, the performance of female college student…

To investigate similarity judgements in different cultural contexts, the performance of two groups of children on seven similarity tasks and on two tests of metaphor was compared. The 45 Canadian and 45 Canadian-Greek children (ages 5, 8, and 11) had different cultural and linguistic backgrounds but common schooling experiences. The seven tasks…

This paper presents (1) data indicating the need to increase the percentage of higher cognitive questions in the instructional program, based upon research showing that questioning strategies are instrumental in improving comprehension; (2) data indicating that questions currently included in instructional programs are predominantly of the lower…

Past research on the development of referential communication abilities in children does not provide a basis for explaining precisely why communicative effectiveness increases. The common assumption is that developments in role-taking facilitate the child's ability to adapt to hearers. A reasonable alternative explanation is that a child's…