This paper examines the characteristics of the thinking skill we call "melioration" i.e., the competence to borrow a concept from a field of knowledge supposedly far removed from his or her domain, and adapt it to a pressing challenge in an area of personal knowledge or interest. The skill has its source in conscious personal meaning-making, not…

This study tested whether the word association employed by individual students could be used to predict their performance in a particular course. It was designed to explore a new method for describing the various models used in thinking and to determine whether this approach would yield results that were consonant with current cognitive theory. At…