The present article focuses on teacher competencies as a major factor that impacts student learning. Ultimately, all attempts to improve education converge in the teacher and the quality of his/her work with students. With their teaching methods, their communication and their classroom management, teachers can structure the kind of learning…

Algebra is a gateway to expanded opportunities, but it often poses difficulty for students with learning disabilities. Consequently, it is essential to identify evidence-based instructional strategies for these students. The authors begin by identifying three areas of algebra difficulty experienced by students with disabilities: cognitive…

This article is about student learning, specifically the problem of what a university can do to develop its students' powers of learning. The broad approach is to discover what we can learn from the university's long experience with developing students' critical faculties and then apply the lessons to developing students' powers of learning. The…

Paper offers teachers some strategies and ideas they might use to help students in their valuing process. (Author)

Holds that young children are limited in their knowledge about cognitive phenomena ("metacognition") and do relatively little monitoring of their own memory, comprehension, and other cognitive enterprises. Proposes a model addressing the question of what adult-like knowledge and behavior might constitute metacognitive developmental targets toward…

Borrowing freely from Freud, Piaget, and others, this article compares and integrates primary (emotional) and secondary (intellectual) process according to seven distinct but overlapping structures: (1) weight; (2) pathways; (3) time and space; (4) operational dialectic; (5) sources of energy; (6) morality; and (7) historical antecedents. Primary…

Stresses the development of complex cognitive processes during adolescence and sees the challenge of the curriculum in the question of greater match between the learner's cognitive level and the material to learned. (JOW)

The work of Jean Piaget stresses the point that intellectual functioning and growth from one stage of cognitive development to the next depends more on the quality of one's experience than on exposure to factual knowledge. Piaget's theoretical model and its implications and applications for the classroom teacher are reviewed. (Editor/RK)

Young children's thinking is subject to constraints which interfere with instruction, and a developmental approach may be useful in minimizing the detrimental effects of these constraints. The approach is particularly beneficial to handicapped children, those who require remedial work, and adults with inadequate working memory for the specific…

Programs to teach students critical thinking must empower them to be self-directed, but they must also stress respect and empathy for the viewpoints of others. (Author/TE)

Thinking tools bring sound instructional theory into the classroom in a practical form that students and teachers both enjoy using. Six such tools are described that have the general characteristics of psychological validity, concreteness, relevance to teachers, and differentiation by type of learning. (TE)

Suggests basic principles to guide the construction of an integrated sequential guide for thinking skills instruction throughout the K-12 curriculum. Strategies emphasize introducing and reinforcing cognitive operations such as information processing, problem solving, critical thinking, and decision making. (TE)

Describes the use of Edward de Bono's CoRT (Cognitive Research Trust) program in English classes during the past five years at Memorial Junior High School in Valley Stream, New York. CoRT tools were used to analyze literary characters and plot development and to generate and organize ideas for writing assignments. (TE)

With Matthew Lipman's Philosophy for Children program, middle school students and their teachers in the Bethlehem (Pennsylvania) Area School District use dialectical reasoning strategies as they contemplate perennial questions. (Author/TE)

At Westover (Connecticut) Elementary Magnet School, a teacher training program called "Talents Unlimited" focuses on critical and creative thinking, invites children to become active learners, and enables teachers to function as facilitators of learning. (TE)