There are many reasons to be curious about the way people learn, and the past several decades have seen an explosion of research that has important implications for individual learning, schooling, workforce training, and policy. In 2000, "How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition" was published and its…

Development of reasoning is often depicted as involving increasing use of relational similarities and decreasing use of perceptual similarities ("the perceptual-to-relational shift"). We argue that this shift is a special case of a broader developmental trend: increasing sensitivity to the predictive accuracy of different similarity types. To test…

Proposes a variant of mental model theory which suggests that the development of conditional reasoning (if--then) can be explained by such factors as the capacity of working memory, range of knowledge available to a reasoner, and his/her ability to access this knowledge "on-line." Finds much empirical data explained by this model.…

As engineers gain experience and become experts in their domain, the structure and content of their knowledge changes. Two studies are presented that examine differences in knowledge representation among freshman and senior engineering students. The first study examines recall of mechanical devices and chunking of components, and the second…

Cognitive development as it progresses from concrete to abstract thinking is discussed as it relates to adolescent youth and the early secondary curriculum. Piagetian tests administered to a group of freshman and sophomore high school students revealed that many had difficulty with those scholastic activities requiring formal reasoning. Three…

This study explored the moral reasoning and scientific argumentation skills of 31 gifted Finnish adolescents participating in a science program at the University of Helsinki. Students were given the Defining Issues Test (DIT) to determine their level of moral reasoning and the Raven test to evaluate their scientific reasoning. The argumentation…

Studied high school and university students' use of mental representations in reasoning, and the developmental progression of their reasoning with concrete and abstract content. Reasoning was more difficult with abstract content. Abstract problems followed by concrete ones led to reduced concrete problem performance for high schoolers but not for…

Fluid intelligence (Gf) is a general relation-perceiving capacity determined by each person's cortical, neurological connection count development. Its processes are involved in reasoning, concept formation and problem-solving, where acculturation has little effect. Crystallized intelligence (Gc) manifests knowledge and general comprehension,…

The roles of impersonal (or abstract) and relational (or connected) modes of knowing in the experiences of young adults were studied, and the ways the two converge are described in this report of the post-college phase of a 7-year longitudinal study of the epistemological development of college students, i.e., their assumptions about the limits,…