This paper reports the results from one of a series of related, collaborative studies carried out in Sandy Bay, Tasmania, Australia, in 1979 and 1980, examining how young children acquire the skills to represent and solve addition and subtraction problems. The purpose of this study was to relate children's cognitive processing capabilities and…

Higher order thinking skills are inevitably developed or exercised relative to some discipline. The discipline may be formal or informal, may or may not be represented in a school curriculum, or relate to a wide variety of domains. Moreover, the development or exercise of thinking skills may take place at differing levels of generality. This paper…

Much criticism is being leveled today at the teaching profession, both for failure to provide students with high levels of cognitive functioning, and for failure to apply careful and systematic thinking to the execution of the many demanding instructional tasks required of the teacher's role. A special pilot study tested the effects of a…

This document contains 53 plenary and contributed papers presented at the eighth Psychology of Mathematics Education (PME) meeting. Two plenary addresses focused on mathematics research in Australia and Japan, and problem solving and symbolism. Contributed papers were classified under 13 headings including: teaching and learning theory; cognition;…

This report describes a computer-based instructional system, the Story Problem Solver (SPS). SPS provides students with instruction about the semantic structure of story problems. It was developed to test a specific schema theory of knowledge organization in long-term memory. For this reason SPS depends explicitly upon a theory of the relationship…

This issue contains abstracts and critical comments for ten mathematics education journal articles, plus an editorial on teacher education needs by Thomas J. Cooney. Two articles focus on problem solving; the remainder concern instruction about and with computers, geometric perceptions, preservice teachers' conceptions of volume, attitudes toward…

The associations among cognitive automatization, abstract problem solving, and educational performance were studied using 127 fourth to ninth grade students. A number of measures of fast, automatic, and fluent performance (FAF measures) were used: writing the alphabet; reading from a word list; and mentally performing arithmetic operations. The…

This annotated bibliography lists published and unpublished elementary and secondary school materials developed in connection with projects of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) from 1970 through 1978. The major portion of the document lists teaching materials. This section first lists documents produced by the Major Thrust in…

This document opens with an editorial comment on two analogical models for mathematics education research. Analyses and abstracts of twelve research reports related to mathematics education follow. Four of the reports deal with aspects of learning theory, two with sex differences, and one each with achievement grouping, drill and practice,…

The major purpose of this study was to assess the degree to which cognitive style, as indexed by the Matching Familiar Figures Test (MFFT), is related to the way in which children respond to problems with social or interpersonal content. Fifty-two reflective and 64 impulsive first- and second-grade boys were presented with a number of stories in…

Presented is a report on a course for undergraduate students which is designed to increase their intellectual abilities early in their college careers. The report gives the characteristics of concrete thought and formal reasoning, followed by an explanation of the process involved in data collecting and the data itself. The authors suggest that…

This collection of nine papers, prepared for a conference held at Northwestern University in 1978, presents varied perspectives on applied problem solving. Assessing applied problem solving, planning for interest and motivation, developing a theory, reviewing research findings, considering learning disabilities, analyzing through information…

Simple and complex learning and problem solving situations were employed with mentally retarded children and adults. In the Rotation-Discrimination Complex and the Size-Discrimination Simple experiments, upper and lower test achievement subgroups were subjected to two basic types of visual discrimination at different levels of task complexity.…

The purpose of this study was to empirically test a set of predictions implied by the Model of Conceptual Learning and Development using the concept of cutting tool. Four subtests were developed to assess a subject's ability to perform at each of four successive levels of concept attainment (concrete, identity, classificatory and formal). In…

This study investigates the cognitive nature of teacher-pupil questions in "process oriented" and "content oriented" secondary social studies programs. Subjects were five classes selected from a program viewed by both teachers and pupils as process-oriented; five from a program viewed by both teachers and pupils as content…