What do cows drink? The correct answer is water, but many are tempted to say milk. The disposition to override an intuitive response (milk) with a more analytic response (water) is known as "cognitive reflection." Tests of cognitive reflection predict a wide range of skills and abilities in adults. In this article, we discuss the…

Using the famous Birthday problem, we present here a practical activity that allows students to perceive the basic reasoning behind simulation and explore its potential. Through a playful approach with probabilities, students are led along a path that illustrates difficulties with intuition and introduces them to theoretical results for sample…

When a Year 7 student physically reacted to a prompt of another student by anxiously drumming the desk with his ruler, exclaiming "uuuuhh", the initial thought of the observing researcher, Laura, was: "this is an interesting account". This started a reflective journey of first applying robust research methodologies to the…

Both scientists and children make important structural discoveries, yet their computational underpinnings are not well understood. Structure discovery has previously been formalized as probabilistic inference about the right structural form--where form could be a tree, ring, chain, grid, etc. (Kemp & Tenenbaum, 2008). Although this approach…

This article presents a fundamental advance in the theory of mental models as an explanation of reasoning about facts, possibilities, and probabilities. It postulates that the meanings of compound assertions, such as conditionals ("if") and disjunctions ("or"), unlike those in logic, refer to conjunctions of epistemic…

I discuss a pedagogical strategy in which we ask students to write about science. Such writing is to be done regularly and often, in class and out of class, in the format of brief "letters to a friend" and longer essays. The goal of this technique is not to teach students how to write; it is to use their writing to help them learn the science.…

Previous research into problem solving in physics resulted in researchers introducing six epistemic games to describe the organizational structures of locally coherent resources. We present a new epistemic game--the "answer-making epistemic game"--which was identified in this paper through the analysis of interviews carried out to validate a…

Most current ethical decision-making models provide a logical and reasoned process for making ethical judgments, but these models are empirically unproven and rely upon assumptions of rational, conscious, and quasi-legal reasoning. Such models predominate despite the fact that many nonrational factors influence ethical thought and behavior,…

Intuitive knowing is one of the most complex and misunderstood ways of knowing. It is difficult to put into words and verbalize. Intuition is spontaneous, heart-centered, free, adventurous, imaginative, playful, nonsequential, and nonlinear. People access intuitive knowledge through dreams, symbols, artwork, dance, yoga, meditation, contemplation,…

In this essay Samuel Rocha primarily addresses, and challenges, the modern conception of reason and the lowly place of intuition, feeling, and love in what has become traditional philosophy and education. Drawing upon the rich thought of William James and Jean-Luc Marion, Rocha introduces the reader to a certain harmony between their ideas, most…

To explicate certain phenomena, e.g., the possibility of deduction without definition, we hypothesize that an individual is able to understand and appreciate reasoning with a due feeling of its necessity when the concept image of each concept involved in the reasoning has reached a certain level of development; we then speak of "deep intuition".…

Clinical supervision is an important aspect of counselor education. Much of traditional supervision is conducted from a logical standpoint; however, some supervisees may be better served when supervisors integrate both logic and creativity. This article presents the integration of creative activities into supervision using Bernard's Discrimination…

In today's world, where the volume of knowledge everyone must deal with is increasing exponentially, many educators agree that schools must focus on developing skills for life-long learning. But what does that mean for an area such as algebra? Teachers' goal in school algebra should be to guide students to "work smarter" with algebraic symbols and…

The author calls into question whether learning to read and write is an exclusively logical and systematic process in which the child moves step-by-step from part to whole, as it is frequently presented in "scientific" reading research. She examines research on different types of intuitive behavior and suggests parallels in the development of…

Johnson-Laird and coworkers' Mental Model theory of propositional reasoning is shown to be somewhere in between what logicians have defined as "credulous" and "skeptical" with respect to the conclusions it draws on default reasoning problems. It is then argued that in situations where skeptical reasoning has been shown to lead to problematic…