In the last decades, students increasingly have been placed in the role of active learners with responsibilities for their own learning. Students have to be able to plan their learning activities and execute them in a systematic and orderly way and to monitor and to evaluate their learning and to reflect on it. All aforementioned skills are…

We compared the performance of 3- and 5-year-old children with that of chimpanzees in two tasks requiring collaboration via complementary roles. In both tasks, children and chimpanzees were able to coordinate two complementary roles with peers and solve the problem cooperatively. This is the first experimental demonstration of the coordination of…

Mathematics instruction can be approached as a cognitive skill, as illustrated by these elementary-level classroom activities. (LH)

This study attempts to follow the development of an "awareness" of the importance of consistency in a logical system with three elements and one operation. Subjects were 127 male and female students, 9-, 11-, 14-, and 16-years-old. (Author/SDH)

Constructivist theory argues that students construct knowledge for themselves and that each knows the world in a different way. The problem for education is how students can construct an "objectified" knowledge. Outlines an integrative framework for the description of information and problem-solving procedures and a problem-solving…

Learning organizations constantly question and make appropriate changes in their "mental models." Mental models include the images, assumptions, and stories that everyone carries around in his/her mind---personal mindsets of what an individual considers to be "reality." For example, "high work performance" or…

Through examples of both a child's imagination and pretend play activities, demonstrates how a child's imagination is the thinking function that sets the stage for play, while actual play consists of a child's understanding and representation of reality. (HOD)

Presents a developmental taxonomy which promotes sequencing activities to enhance the potential of matching these activities with learner needs and readiness, suggesting that the order commonly found in the classroom needs to be inverted. The proposed taxonomy (story, skill, and algorithm) involves problem-solving emphasis in the classroom. (JN)

This paper describes a method of understanding student problem-solving behavior during computer-assisted instruction using trigonometry as the example domain. Instead of attempting to model the student's process for solving problems, techniques which infer the equivalence between two adjacent steps in the student's process are used to determine…

The learning activities in this handbook were taken directly from Tucson Early Education Model (TEEM) classrooms and designed to foster intellectual and language development. More specifically, these activities are designed to foster linguistic awareness, sensory perception, curiosity, and imagination, to guide the child in differentiating fantasy…

The article describes a curriculum used in gifted programming which is based on Guilford's Structure of Intellect (SOI) theory of intelligence. Sourcebooks and individual SOI modules have been developed to train over 90 kinds of intellectual ability. Five categories of intellectual ability are defined (cognition, memory, evaluation, convergent…

This paper argues that it is important to provide children with complementary activities in a horizontal arrangement in order to promote acceleration of vertical levels of thinking. A brief review of literature on the relationship between experience and logical thinking is presented and the definition and function of transfer are discussed.…

Adults can encourage young children to assimilate and use information through inventing, creating, experimenting, and other activities. This guide, part of the "Seeds for Success" series, provides ideas for parents on being their children's first and most important teacher by means of nearly 100 simple activity ideas designed for use with 3- to…

This practicum was designed to incorporate critical thinking skills instruction and practice into a fourth-grade curriculum to increase fourth-grade students' ability to recognize and apply critical thinking strategies to appropriate situations. This program concentrated on the increasing of six critical thinking skills: classification, sequence…

This paper discusses the meaning and formation of children's play in order to (1) deepen understanding and respect for what play is, (2) demonstrate how young children cannot thrive or survive without play, and (3) give a common framework for interpreting and deriving meaning from the play behavior that occurs in the daily lives of young children.…