Cognitive abilities of social drinkers are generally thought to be affected by alcohol only during acute intoxication, but several studies suggest that sober-state performance may be affected by the quantity of alcohol consumed per drinking episode. Although the findings regarding sober-state mental deficits in social drinkers are inconclusive,…

This study describes the emerging mathematical understanding of one student enrolled in an elementary mathematics content course. Through the medium of her journal entries, a portrait of Elena's struggle to overcome her difficulty with mathematics and construct conceptual knowledge emerges. Though these struggles are not unique, Elena's story is…

The literature on human aggression is large and diverse. Some of it is theory-driven, but much of it dwells on solving social problems rather than on building general models and research paradigms. This paper examines some of the research programs and theoretical emphases in aggression research and presents theory convergences to see how these…

All contemporary learning theorists agree on the advantages of involving students in authentic problem-solving activities in both in-school and out-of-school contexts. Approaches which use real-world problems as learning tools fit well with: (1) the strategy-based, performance model advanced by information processors; (2) the impasse or…

The goal of books in this series is to present work that is on the growing tip of research in cognitive development. The theme of this volume is children's logical and mathematical cognition, a field in which Piaget's influence has been extensive. In the first of the six chapters, Acredolo presents a new theory of the cognitive bases for…

Shows that one of the most general processes in the development of cognitive structures consists in replacing exogenous knowledge by endogenous reconstructions that reconstitute the same forms but incorporate them into systems whose internal composition is a pre-requisite. Biologically equivalent process is discussed. (Author/AM)

Noting the lack of definitive information about teaching thinking skills and how they are implemented throughout the year or how they are coordinated among subject areas and articulated along grade levels, this booklet is intended to provide school districts with a successful plan for developing a comprehensive thinking program for grades K-12.…

When a person encounters a problem, the character, form, and content of his or her response provides psychologists with useful and interesting information about processes of challenge and their relationship to intellectual development. In essence, challenge is a developing relationship that is defined on the one hand by objective factors (a person…

The teaching of decision-making, problem-solving, and higher-order thinking skills is necessary to ensure adaptability to our world of accelerated change. Living skills in the technology and information age will include the understanding and application of higher level thinking skills, which will be the educational "basics" of tomorrow.…

The perception of death gradually develops in a child's mind, reaching maturity at about 8 or 9 years of age. A mature death concept usually means a definition which includes the perception of death as a natural process, its finality, its irreversibility, and its universality. A study was undertaken to improve knowledge about the death concept.…

Over the past two decades, theorists and researchers in cognitive structural developmental psychology have begun to investigate the social processes that impact upon individual cognitive growth. Studies have focused on how interactional processes lead to cognitive development but not on how the interactional processes are formed. This paper…

The design and architecture of two user-controlled, computer-based problem analysis environments in classical mechanics are discussed. In the expert-like environment, the user analyzes problems according to a hierarchical concept schema consistent with how experts analyze novel problems in physics. In the second environment, the user searches a…

One approach to the study of cognitive processes highlights the distinctions between expert and novice problem solvers. This approach attempts to discover how experts and novices differ in the way they organize, retain and use domain related knowledge. It appears to some that what is learned from expert-novice research can help teachers to teach…

This investigation examined the relationship between problem solving ability and the criteria used to decide whether two classical mechanics problems could be solved similarly. The investigators began by comparing experts and novices on a similarity judgment task and found that experts predominantly relied on the problems' deep structure in…

Systematic observations of thousands of high school students in the California Mentally Gifted Minors/Gifted and Talented Education programs identified five principles underlying the development of high level thinking skills in this population: (1) Exceptional performance on any criterion requires mutually reinforcing antecedents, the effects of…