To determine how children cope with some of the demands imposed on them by arithmetic word problems, 200 sixth-graders were asked to solve prolems modeled after those used by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. A quantitative demand was imposed on the children by adding extraneous information to the problems, and a verbal demand was…

Spider World is an interactive program designed to help individuals with no previous computer experience to learn the fundamentals of programming. The program emphasizes cognitive tasks which are central to programming and provides significant problem-solving opportunities. In Spider World, the user commands a hypothetical robot (called the…

Attempts to train learning strategies have not produced marked or lasting increases in academic IQ, probably because current training models fail to recognize the evolutionary nature of strategies acquisition. Empirical and theoretical evidence supports an incidental learning model, which engineers the instructional environment following study…

Futures research involves speculation about alternative developments based upon existing data and potential choices. Effective futures research requires creativity in scientific practice rather than an overemphasis on reason. In discussing the important role of intuition in futures research, characteristics of creative scientists are reviewed and…

There is little doubt that intervention research based on metacognitive principles has been remarkably successful in improving children's performance on a range of academic tasks. However, to build on this success, at least three modifications need to be made in the way metacognition is usually thought about. First, more attention needs to be…

From a search of (mostly French) literature, a hypothesis was formulated that students with both academic training and work experience would solve a practical learning problem more easily than students with academic learning only. A study was conducted at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris to test this hypothesis. Two groups,…

The development of game theory was a response to a need to understand human decision making processes in situations of incomplete or imperfect information. By reducing decision making situations to probability game systems, it is possible to analyze and test various competitive strategies that maximize wins and minimize losses. Although game…

This document focuses on a series of studies that viewed aspects of conditional reasoning. The investigations were concerned with the processes children use to acquire patterns of deductive inference and logical relationships pertaining to propositional reasoning. The first experiment, involving 96 children each in grades 2 and 5, investigated the…

The papers contained in this document were originally presented at the May 1978 conference on Modeling Mathematical Cognitive Development sponsored by the Models of Learning Mathematics Working Group of the Georgia Center for the Study of Learning and Teaching Mathematics. Most have been revised to reflect comments and suggestions made at the…

Much recent cognitive and artificial intelligence research has focused on the development of "schema theory." This theory supposes the existence of knowledge and memory structures that encode prototypical descriptions of familiar concepts. Schema theory has developed in a scientific environment that stresses interdisciplinary approaches…

Approaches to helping students remember concepts in secondary mathematics are presented. The eleven points listed are: 1) distinguishing between natural and whole numbers; 2) remembering isosceles triangles have two equal sides; 3) finding all possible pairs of integral factors of a given number; 4) recalling the meaning of reflexive, symmetric,…

The purpose of this document is to survey at least some of the important research literature on solving linear equations in order to identify information that might suggest ways to improve teaching effectiveness. The studies that are examined employ a wide range of research techniques, are based often on quite different perspectives, and span over…

The two main objectives of the present study were to get a better understanding of sixth-graders' solution processes with respect to arithmetic word problems and to investigate the possibility of improving children's problem-solving ability through instruction. As background for the study, a hypothetical model of the problem-solving process was…

The componential conception of intelligence is summarized and contrasted with the psychometric conception. A brief history of concepts of intelligence is presented, beginning with Galton's anthropometric approach and Binet's more educationally relevant approach. Spearman's, and later Thurstone's, contributions to factor analysis promoted a…

The purpose of this study was to select a high school using the Individualized Instructional System (ISIS) materials and the Introductory Physical Science (IPS) course and to detect any changes in the students' attitudes toward science and ability to employ specific processes of science at the end of a semester of coursework. Wayne, Nebraska, High…