If we admit that students must be prepared for life and work in increasingly culturally-diverse and ever changing contexts through core curricula which are the competences that must be prioritized? What competences are 'strong candidates' to be considered as trans-regional and can lead to inclusive excellence in higher education? Does, this,…

This study investigated 137 Venezuelan college freshmen's performance on the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking as a function of field dependence or independence as well as "field mobility." Findings indicated that the most mobile students performed best on creativity tests whereas "fixed" students performed better on tests of…

Creativity can be distinguished from intelligence, but there is no consensus on how the recognized stages of the creative act can be taught. The steps to rational thinking can and should be intentionally taught and rationality may prepare a base for unexpected creative insights. (DB)

Using Raven Progressive Matrices Test items, this study developed an empirical measure of subjects' ability to create new problems. The relationship between this ability and problem solving skills was examined. A very low correlation was found between inventing and solving problems. Problem creation was more difficult than problem solving. (BS)

Conventional instruction in critical thinking may ignore the creative and intuitive functions of rationality, thereby encouraging a mechanically rote approach to textual analysis, problem solving, and problem construction. Such an overemphasis upon logical "calculus of justification" functions has epistemological weaknesses and pedagogical…

The development of critical ability, or cognitive criticism, is being studied in a two-year Swedish project described in this progress report. Cognitive criticism is valuable in all occupational fields, but especially futurology and technology assessment. This project proposes to make concrete the aims of critical training, and to identify and…

This investigation analyzed sex-related and age-related differences on spatial visualization tasks, reasoning tasks, and mathematical problem-solving tasks; and the effects instruction in visual thinking would have on these differences. Students in fifth grade, ninth grade, and in college, were tested before and after twelve weeks of instruction…

Student and test characteristics were examined by multiple regression analysis and discriminant function analysis to explain why 171 political science undergraduates scored differently on essay versus objective final examinations. Student characteristics included: (1) patterns of creative, crystallized, and fluid abilities as measured by the…