Maintains that imaginative philosophical dialogue is an essential and necessary condition to education. Contends that the development of an autonomous person who has the ability to think well and to think for him or herself about matters of importance is essential in a democracy. (Author/JDH)

Investigates the relationship between class inclusion and reasoning in 56 Dutch Children between 6 and 14 years of age. Concludes that when the children failed to respond correctly to questions about the validity of syllogisms, they did so because they lacked sufficient understanding of the premises. (HOD)

Three experiments using college students examine the processes involved in deductive reasoning. Effects of training in classroom and laboratory situations confirmed the authors' hypothesis that people use pragmatic reasoning schemas rather than syntactics rules of logic for problem solving. Training materials used in experiments 1 and 3 are…

Experiments to probe the nature of one mode of thinking, imagined spatial operations, have been devised. Results confirm that the mind can model physical processes, subjecting them to the geometric constraints that hold in the external world. The experimental work and implications are discussed in detail. (MNS)

Describes an Israeli reading program for disadvantaged adolescents based on verbal exercises using informative, literary, and speculative texts to improve their reading comprehension and cognitive functions. (HOD)

We examine eight cases of argumentation in relation to a proportional reasoning task--the "Paint" task--in which the "constant sum" strategy was a significant factor. Our analysis of argument follows Toulmin's (1958) approach and in the discourse we trace factors which seem to facilitate changes in argument. We find that the arguments of "constant…

This paper reports on methods of students' justifications of their solution to a problem in the area of combinatorics. From the analysis of the problem solving of 150 students in a variety of settings from high-school to graduate study, four major forms of reasoning evolved: (1) Justification by Cases, (2) Inductive Argument, (3) Elimination…

This study explored the moral reasoning and scientific argumentation skills of 31 gifted Finnish adolescents participating in a science program at the University of Helsinki. Students were given the Defining Issues Test (DIT) to determine their level of moral reasoning and the Raven test to evaluate their scientific reasoning. The argumentation…

This book shows students how to increase their power to analyze problems and comprehend what they read. First it outlines and illustrates methods that good problem solvers use in attacking complex ideas, then it provides practice in applying these methods to a variety of comprehension and reasoning questions. The "Whimbey Method" of teaching…

Revised version of a lecture presented to a workshop of the Commission of German Scholars of Poland and Germany, Warsaw, Poland, December 4, 1972. (DD)

Extends P. E. Jonson's studies of physics learning by analyzing, on the basis of a 12-student control group, 24 high-school students' word associations, aptitude scores, and achievement results during instruction. Indicated a positive relationship between problem-solving ability and meaningful concept formation. (CC)

Induction refers to categorizing sensory experience and substitution to interchanging similar objects. If similar items are functionally identical and near the focus of attention at nearly the same time, similarity impedes learning (interference). If either condition is not fulfilled, similarity aids learning (transfer). (DD)