Outlines the elements of a revised epistemological approach to thinking about library and information science. Hermeneutical phenomenology seeks an understanding of the essence of things (such as the library) and takes into account, among other things, the intentional stances of the human actors within the realm of library and information science.…

Traces the decline of rhetoric and the underlying social changes that hastened its fall from grace. Argues the need for a reconstructed rhetoric. Creates a context for considering a visual rhetoric. Suggests that abstraction and scientific reductionism fail to address issues of human agency. Cites five examples of social or cultural problems that…

Includes a dandelion poem that is designed to stimulate elementary students' creativity and abstract-thinking skills. Offers several exercises to go with the poem: creating mental pictures, drawing first images, and performing for better understanding. A reproducible for creating a dandelion-shaped poem is included. (SM)

Describes an earlier study on the main characteristics and background of undergraduate students' difficulties when trying to solve mathematical tasks. Focuses on and extends part of an earlier study that concerned task solving strategies. Indicates that focusing on what is familiar and remembered at a superficial level is dominant over reasoning…

Describes a framework for identifying and classifying students' alternative conceptions and unscientific patterns of reasoning within a particular scientific domain. Provides a basic system for indicating how much researchers know about students' non-scientific conceptions and reasoning. Suggests how the framework may prove useful for…

Interviews 120 children in kindergarten and grades 2, 4, and 6 with five Piagetian tasks to determine the grade level at which most have constructed transitive reasoning, unit iteration, and conservation of speed. Indicates that construction of the logic necessary to make sense of the measurement of time is generally not complete before sixth…

Two experiments with children five and eight years of age examined the effects of different types of similarity on analogical problem solving and explored the cognitive components responsible for these effects. Results indicated that superficial and structural similarity facilitated the process of drawing analogies. (WJC)

Articulates and operationalizes a framework for investigating the level of quantitative literacy in the United States. Uses data from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) to document the level of quantitative literacy in the U.S. Indicates that students fall short in their understanding of the nature of mathematics and the…

The Test of Nonverbal Intelligence-3rd Edition (TONI-3) and the Analogic Reasoning (AR) subscale of the Universal Nonverbal Intelligence Test (UNIT) were administered to 35 individuals with autism to determine whether real-world-knowledge deficits affected intelligence scores. The 2 tests are similar in format; however, the TONI-3 includes only…

Comprehension of moral reasoning is important both for successful moral education and for Kohlbergian claims that moral reasoning development is cognitive in nature. Because a psychometrically appropriate moral comprehension instrument does not appear to exist, the Moral Comprehension Questionnaire (MCQ) was constructed in Study 1 and displayed…

This paper provides an instrumental account of precalculus students' graphical process for solving polynomial inequalities. It is carried out in terms of the students' instrumental schemes as mediated by handheld graphing calculators and in cooperation with their classmates in a classroom setting. The ethnographic narrative relays an instrumental…

Moral sensitivity is the first component of the 4-component moral action process (J. R. Rest, 1986). The author reviews moral sensitivity operationalization and measurement across multiple samples and domains. She reviews 3 definitions of the construct (i.e., "recognition and affective response, recognition, and recognition and ascription of…

This paper considers mathematical abstraction as arising through a natural mechanism of the biological brain in which complicated phenomena are compressed into thinkable concepts. The neurons in the brain continually fire in parallel and the brain copes with the saturation of information by the simple expedient of suppressing irrelevant data and…

In this article, the author describes her attempt to develop more interactive mental mathematics sessions. She observed that her students perceive the multiplication tables as a series of facts which are either known or not known, not as tools which could be used to derive other facts in a flexible manner. She therefore undertook the task of…

This paper describes the effects of learning support on simulation-based learning in three learning models: experiment prompting, a hypothesis menu, and step guidance. A simulation learning system was implemented based on these three models, and the differences between simulation-based learning and traditional laboratory learning were explored in…