Three groups of third graders were used to test the importance of a teaching progressions -- concrete to abstract and abstract to concrete -- using an instruction unit on land use which developed concepts of site, scale, aerial perspective, and areal association. (JH)

This study reports the development of a sentence preference test designed to contrast tendencies to abstract, generalise and particularise in thinking. (Editor)

The task consisted of categorizing a set of slides depicting concepts of freedom, nonfreedom, justice, and nonjustice. The results of the analysis indicated that abstract thinkers performed significantly better than did concrete thinkers and that performance increased as a function of grade level. (Author/BJG)

The present paper describes results of a study that investigated 209 bilingual Puerto Rican college students' ability to solve verbal deductive reasoning problems administered in Spanish and English in relation to their reading comprehension skills in either language. A series of confirmatory factor analyses revealed that the data on reasoning and…

Science and social studies teachers can use these sample learning activities to teach reasoning skills in grades 5-9. The publication was developed by a group which provides information and assistance to Vermont educators of science and social studies in the fifth through the ninth grades with a focus on the teaching and learning of reasoning…

Arthur Jensen has argued that genetic differences in abstract reasoning ability, not cultural bias in the test item, are the causes of differences in standardized test performance between American Blacks and Whites. He used a study by Frank McGurk to support his argument. McGurk's study used test items judged most cultural or least cultural. These…

Reading is a process of forming and evaluating hypotheses to account for the data in a text. Because of its complexity, the task of reading requires strategies for controlling the proliferation of hypotheses. Four of these strategies are (1) jumping to conclusions, (2) maintaining inertia (refusing to abandon a hypothesis in spite of contradictory…

This research explored the development of reasoning about persuasion. First-grade, seventh-grade, and undergraduate subjects were individually presented with a hypothetical persuasive situation in which a young child attempts to obtain a toy from various "targets." Pairs of tape-recorded persuasive appeals were randomly presented to each…

Two experiments involving 42 students from the Model Secondary School for the Deaf investigated both the visual and tactile components in the processing of spatial information. Test measures used were the Figures Rotations Test, Group Embedded Figures Test, and Tactile Rotations Test. The study suggested that spatial reasoning is a determining…

The interrelationships among young adults' levels of moral reasoning, their preferred discipline style, and how they reason with children on moral issues was investigated. After initial screening, 25 males and 25 females completed a test on defining issues of moral judgement. Then 20 subjects were classified at the high principled level, and 30 at…

The author provides 79 short maxims on the nature of contemporary education. An aphorism is defined as a short pithy statement of truth as perceived by the author. As an introduction, 12 characteristics of aphorisms, a short historical survey of aphorisms, and examples by well-known writers are provided. Aphorisms, usually brief, may use words…

This paper questions evidence for the thesis that causal reasoning of older children is more logical than that of younger ones, and describes two experiments which attempted to determine (1) whether there are true developmental differences in causal reasoning, and (2) what explanations for developmental differences can be supported. In the first…