Courses designed to teach problem-solving and creativity, which are relatively new additions to college curricula, are discussed, along with their intellectual foundations and research on these two processes. The teaching of these processes involves the following course goals: teaching a specific subject, generally useful skills, and professional…

This booklet is designed for elementary and middle school teachers to use in teaching students how to improve their test-taking skills. The authors draw the analogy between an athlete preparing for the big race and a young student getting ready for an important test. The central character is an underdeveloped test-taking tiger who, after going…

Two experiments tested the idea that the means by which children acquire efficacy information can produce different levels of task motivation and self-perception of competence. In Experiment 1, children periodically received either ability attributional feedback, effort feedback, ability plus effort feedback, or no attributional feedback. Although…

By structuring the manner group members use to reach a decision, managers can affect the processes and outcomes of decision making. Business administration undergraduates (N=78) were randomly assigned to three groups and told to make group decisions based on the process their manager selected, i.e., they were either to seek concurrence, debate…

A study investigated the relationship among teacher problem solving style, classroom behaviors, and susceptibility to the expectancy phenomenon (the possibility that pupil classroom performance can be influenced by a teacher's attitudes, beliefs, and actions). Based on Elkind's conceptual shift experiments (1966), 12 elementary school teachers…

Piaget's last works (1975, 1977, and 1980) add a dynamic aspect to his earlier exceptionally formal structural model. He portrays change in more functionalistic terms and describes conflict, referring to the process of perturbations and compensations to explain the regulations of the network of cognitive cycles. He suggests three types of balances…

A sequence of action-oriented games and initiatives is provided in this guide for group therapy leaders who wish to employ activities to promote trust, problem solving, and cohesion among group members. Introductory material discusses the objectives of action-oriented therapy, the adaptation of traditionally outdoor activities to indoor settings,…

This manual presents a proposal to reduce arbitration or negotiation impasses and to accommodate conflicting interests by selecting a permanent neutral to monitor labor relations both during the term of the agreement and during contract negotiations. Part 1 describes the role of the permanent neutral during the term of the collective bargaining…

This document consists of 51 articles (originally published in the "Arithmetic Teacher") which provide teachers with ideas for manipulative aids and activities. Guidelines used to select articles for this collection called for them to have a clear purpose and be related to a contemporary topic in the elementary school mathematics curriculum, to…

Tautologies in student essays, arguments that most commonly assume the truth or self-evidence of themselves without relationship to something other than themselves, can be identified whenever an essay contains a series of nonsuccessive, noncumulative discourse units. Three kinds of tautologies in student papers are tautologies of redundancy,…

The paper describes research examining the interrelationships among cognitive, linguistic, and social development in a sample of dysphasic children (having severe linguistic problems disproportionate to cognitive abilities) using microprocessors as a special diagnostic and training environment. Two studies are described; the first (the Comparison…

This report describes a preliminary evaluation in September 1979 of 12 program topics and their stated objectives for an instructional television series, the Secondary School Health Project, which addresses issues relevant to the personal and social growth of adolescents. The study addressed the following questions: (1) How can the series' topics…

The general purpose of this study was to explore the possibility of adapting the Means-Ends Problem-Solving procedure (MEPS) to the investigation of the individual's transition to parenthood. Specific purposes were to determine (1) the internal consistency of the Parent Problem-Solving Scale (PPSS), of its subclasses, and of a combined subscale;…

This monograph was designed primarily to develop awareness of the benefits of using calculators to teach mathematics in grades K-8 and to provide teachers with some specific teaching ideas. The first section, on the rationale for using calculators, presents position statements from various groups and answers some questions about the use of…

How seven pivotal skills in elementary school mathematics are treated in five current (1981-1983) textbook series for grades 2-4 is described. The report considers the amount of instruction and practice provided, where it is located in the textbook's year-long sequence of lessons, and the extent to which practice is concentrated in one place or…