Difficulties facing learning disabled (LD) students in problem solving are reviewed and an approach is proposed to help them make better use of the learning strategies available to them. A cognitive learning style approach to LD students is introduced, followed by an analysis of problem solving and the stages of information processing (attention,…

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.…

This two-part study began with a replication, statistical validation, and extension of the Karmiloff-Smith and Inhelder study of children's construction of theories about balance. The 128 subjects (ages 4 to 6) were videotaped as they tried to balance blocks on a fulcrum. A scale was developed to assess the degree to which the child's performance…

Designed to examine the structural differences in the representation of medical problems in subjects with varying degrees of medical expertise, this study uses an online, thinking-aloud technique to investigate the validity of Feltovich and Barrows' model of expert medical knowledge and illness scripts. Study methodology involved asking one…

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…

Intended as a resource for teachers of grades four and up who are eager to improve their students' thinking skills while teaching their regular curriculum, this booklet contains activities that can be used to teach a new concept or to review a previously taught skill. Following an introduction, the topics of the chapters of the resource guide and…

In order to study children's strategies for solving geometric matrices similar to those in the Raven's Progressive Matrices, ninety 7-, 10-, and 13-year-old boys and girls were administered tests of auditory and visual memory, the Raven's, and geometric matrices. The matrices varied in number of elements (1 to 3) and number of transformations (0…

The study is described which examined quantitative and qualitative differences among learning disabled (LD) subgroups and between LD and normal Ss in reasoning and problem solving behaviors. The research strategy involved (1) detailed analyses of the behavior of subgroups of LD adolescents and of matched normal achieving adolescents in a task…

Explanations for memory development have tended to focus on acquistion of general strategies and metaknowledge. Recently, emphasis has been given to the knowledge base as a whole, including general world-knowledge and domain-specific knowledge and procedures. Evidence is presented from the memory development literature showing why strategies and…

Proposes a self-instructional strategy training paradigm designed to explicitly teach that the use of heuristic processes and mediational devices can be employed to compensate for age-associated deficits, such as poor problem solving. Format for the procedure was derived from the developmental research of the Soviet psychologists Vygotsky and…

The conference papers in this collection emphasize the theoretical significance of their authors' work in the areas of mathematical and cognitive psychology. Major topics considered include facilitation of problem solving; psychological differences among problem isomorphs; the process of understanding in problem solving; processing information for…