Finds that various aspects of formal reasoning correlated significantly with mean t-unit lengths written by high school freshman boys, but not by freshman girls. Suggests that the reasoning tasks may have been biased against females. (RL)

The rising popularity of career-oriented courses presents a new challenge to the concept of liberal education; however, evidence shows that a liberal education provides the versatility and adaptiveness vital to a modern executive. Visits to 20 liberal arts colleges with strong career emphases in their programs are described. (MLW)

Richard Sterling, executive director of nation's largest inservice training project, discusses his plans to enlarge the scope of the National Writing Project and place it at center of school reform. With 160 sites in 45 states and Puerto Rico, this 25-year-old project brings together expert teachers for extended summer training. Teachers…

Examines, based on research from southern Africa, Northern Ireland, the Middle East, and the United States, the ways in which community violence affects children, their families, and communities. It reviews the literature, highlights recurring themes, and discusses the implications of this research for school and community intervention in the…

Ninety-six children from a high-iodine Chinese village were found to have higher goiter incidence, thyroid gland volume, and urinary/creatinine ratio than 51 children from an iodine-normal village. All children from both villages were euthyroid. Excess iodine did not substantially affect the children's physical or intellectual growth. (Author/JDD)

This article discusses William G. Perry's model of intellectual development, which posits that college students move through four phases of understanding their relationship to knowledge: dualism (knowledge as received truth), multiplicity (knowledge as opinion), relativism (knowledge as relativistic), and commitment in relativism. Specific…

Developmental assumptions that are frequently regarded as constraints on elementary school science curricula are analyzed. The argument that elementary school children cannot function as experimentalists because they have not yet attained formal operational thought is not supported by the Piagetian or non-Piagetian research reviewed. (SLD)

The ways in which Miami University (Ohio) has addressed some issues of interdisciplinary study are reported. Issues include disciplinary background needed by students before interdisciplinary study and by teachers before interdisciplinary teaching; the roles of the individual disciplines; intellectual skill development; and interdisciplinary study…

It is argued that Australian elementary mathematics curricula have been influenced by earlier British and United States educational movements and theories and are out of touch with current research emphasizing a constructivist approach. A new model of young children's numerical development is offered, and recommendations for improving mathematical…

This paper examines reasons for the relatively few eminent women creators and considers values relating to intellectual achievement, precocious development of skill, and creators' tendency to work alone. The paper concludes that women's strong need for social intimacy is an impediment to their creativity, as it pulls them away from a strong…

Methods for teaching higher order thinking skills to students with special needs are considered. These include microthinking skills (e.g., classification); critical thinking skills; and major thinking operations (e.g., problem solving, decision making, and conceptualizing). Strategies for teaching individual skills and for incorporating thinking…

Reviews the literature on the relationship between schooling, IQ, and the cognitive processes presumed to underpin IQ. The data suggest the importance of quantity of schooling for IQ. Schooling fosters the development of cognitive processes that underpin performance on IQ tests. This development is unrelated to the quality of schools. (BC)

Measures of visual and tactual recognition memory, tactual-visual transfer, and object permanence were obtained for preterm and full-term infants. Measures of tactual-visual transfer were correlated with later intelligence measures up to the age of five years. These correlations were independent of socioeconomic status, medical risk, and early…

The Piagetian conceptualization of autonomy as the ability to decide between right and wrong in the moral sense and between truth and falsehood in the intellectual sense is considered as the aim of education. The implications of the goal of autonomy are discussed for school psychologists. (SLD)

A study used the Coursework Cluster Analysis Model to identify college courses associated with gains in student learning, then sought faculty perceptions about methods for teaching and assessing those abilities. Teacher perceptions corroborated the statistical analysis and improved understanding of how student assessment, individual courses, and…