Developed in response to deficiencies in verbal and quantitative skills demonstrated by students entering New Jersey colleges and taking the New Jersey Basic Skills Placement Test, this overview is designed to help interested educators orient themselves to the important and rapidly growing field of thinking skills instruction. The Task Force on…

Proposes a model of critical thinking in science with affective (dispositions), cognitive (knowledge, basic skills, and higher order skills), and behavioral (contextualized or generalized behaviors) components. Describes the links and mutual influences between the environment and these components. Emphasizes the role of affectivity in the…

The primary purpose of this module is to develop preservice student ability to write precise behavioral objectives and to match the thinking level of behavioral objectives with the kinds of thinking expected of elementary pupils exposed to teaching based on those behavioral objectives. The student will also be taught to compose teacher questions…

Well-known questioning strategies, built on question classification systems, are examined. Types of question classification systems are identified as: "hierarchical," which are sequential and cumulative; "non-hierarchical," which are based on elements which should not be rank ordered; systems which are "context-bound" to specifics; and…

Questions teachers use to elicit responses from students affect the kind of thought process the student will use and subsequently the type of answer he will suggest ways in which behavioral and educational objectives are reflected in teacher questions. Simplified interaction analysis techniques can be useful in diagnosing and assessing the…

The essentials of Piaget's theory and its application to teaching at the college level are described as part of the Learning and Evaluation Service workshop, Teaching Students to Reason, offered at Michigan State University. Objectives are to enable the teacher to: (1) diagnose and classify reasoning patterns of students; (2) evaluate current…

Limitations of past research on college teaching and a recent exploratory study are considered. The study focused on the degree to which teachers encourage, praise, or use student ideas; the degree to which teachers ask questions that encourage evaluative and divergent thinking; the degree to which students make higher levels of cognitive…

The plea of this bulletin, the second and full revision of The Problems Approach and the Social Studies copyrighted in 1955 and 1960, is for teachers to do more with the reflective method in their classrooms. It draws upon the latest and most pertinent insights distilled from research, theory, and practice associated with reflective thinking;…