The author argues that, in all people, one hemisphere of the brain has dominance--either the left, logical side, or the right, creative side. He presents methods of improving the design and delivery of learning through developing the recessive hemisphere. (CT)

Suggests that future pedagogy should search for methods to develop conscious thinking and to connect detailed learning with creative, utility-oriented human activities. Different pedagogical forms should be applied to a greater extent in universities and ordinary adult education. (JOW)

Discusses the use of graphics in instruction and concludes that cosmetic and motivational graphics can be more realistic and detailed for affective goals, while schematic graphics may be best for the more cognitive functions of focusing attention and presenting actual content. Domains of learning, mental models, and visualization are examined.…

Discusses the dichotomy between rational and nonrational learning processes, arguing for an integration of both. Reviews information processing theory and related learning strategies. Presents a model instructional strategy that fully integrates rational and nonrational processes. Describes implications for teaching and learning of the learning…

Reviews Karmiloff-Smith's "Beyond Modularity," suggesting that her work highlights phenomena that seem counter intuitive when regarded from current developmental frameworks, and advocates that understanding them requires more complex perspectives than can be supported by either extreme nativist or domain-general models of cognitive…

Describes BACEIS (Behavior, Attitudes, Cognition, Environment viewed as Interactive Systems), a comprehensive theoretical model that includes internal and external factors affecting the development, retention, and transfer of thinking and learning skills. Uses of the model in instructional design, to guide research, and to critique existing…

Discusses a connectionist, or neural network, model of learning and representation. Argues that the less musical representations are developed, the more listeners refer to nonmusical associations to understand music. Suggests that music education should begin by providing students with tools to deal with music based on experiences already familiar…

Discusses theoretical and practical issues connected with implicit and explicit learning of languages. Explicit learning is knowledge expressed in the form of rules or definitions; implicit knowledge can be inferred to exist because of observed performance but cannot be clearly described. Hypothesizes why explicit learning can lead to implicit…

Calls for a coalition of different research methods and strategies to better understand learning and development. Describes two such strategies: (1) testing-the-limits decomposing age-graded differences in upper limits of plasticity; and (2) experimental simulation of development, a coordinated sequence of theory-guided research steps. Both…

Dual task procedures--elaborative strategy use and finger tapping--were used to examine both recall and mental effort demands of elaboration strategy use among second and third graders. Results indicated that boys and girls did not differ in recall of arbitrarily paired items, but for feminine pairs, girls recalled more than boys; for masculine…

Category knowledge allows for both the determination of category membership and an understanding of what the members of a category are like. Diagnostic information is used to determine category membership; prototypical information reflects the most likely features given category membership. Two experiments examined 2 means of category learning,…

This paper reviews a body of work conducted in our laboratory that applies functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to better understand the biological response and change that occurs during prototype-distortion learning. We review results from two experiments (Little, Klein, Shobat, McClure, & Thulborn, 2004; Little & Thulborn, 2005) that…

For years, mainstream thinking about math anxiety assumed that people fear math because they are bad at it. However, a growing body of research shows a much more complicated relationship between math ability and anxiety. It is true that people who fear math have a tendency to avoid math-related classes, which decreases their math competence.…

A group of 73 normal children (ages 8 to 10) was compared to 49 age-matched developmentally dyslexic children of average intelligence on the California Verbal Learning Test for Children (CVLT-C), to determine if reading disability was associated with impaired verbal memory. Dyslexics differed significantly from controls on 9 of the 12 CVLT-C…

Concepts, propositions, proposition sets, and process patterns are discussed as elements of a model of language-related basic thinking skills. The term "concept" is defined and illustrated, and a model of concept attainment is briefly described. Illustrations are offered for a set of 430 basic concept clusters intended for use as a…