Piaget's studies clearly highlight two qualitative advances made during the preoperational period. The first is the breakthrough of representational intelligence, beginning around 2 years of age. The second is the emergence of coordinated representational thought, beginning around 4 years of age. This paper focuses on the second advance, which…

Proster Theory is a theory of learning which has been proposed by Leslie A. Hart (1975). The theory is based on the functions of the brain. Learning is seen as the formation of programs, which are simply sequences of instructions by which the brain directs the muscles, sense organs, or other portions of the neurological system. Programs which are…

The call to a career in education does not come from logic or reason; rather, teachers are propelled by the deeper meaning of education--the meaning behind curricular instruction. Educators are driven by an artistic impulse to guide their students on the individual quest for intellectual enlightenment. An instructor cannot teach the essentials of…

Advocates and teachers of critical thinking tend to deny that intuition and justification are logical, even though they assume that both processes are rational. However, it can be demonstrated that the relation between intuition and inference, between justification and explanation, is dialectical and complementary, so that there is no mystery as…

The strength of intuitive knowledge is illustrated by the difficulty that individuals have in trying to restructure student misconceptions. In order to harness this power, intuition must be developed within the context of each new concept to be taught. An experiment with one possible approach to this instructional problem is described and…

Three classes of conceptual bugs presenting obstacles to all novice programmers and not related to any specific program--parallelism, intentionality, and egocentrism--are identified and exemplified through student errors. It is suggested these bugs are rooted in students' intuitive feeling that programming languages, like humans, have intelligent,…

Described is a project which explored how elementary teachers' intuitive knowledge (the common sense sort of information built from personal experimentation on the physical environment in contrast to formal knowledge learned in school) affects their educational practices. (RM)

A noted writer of fiction explores the role of imagination in the intellectual development of children and the need for imagination in various facets of daily lives and suggests ways of stimulating its use by children. (RBW)

Designers of computer-based material are forced to express interactivity with concepts from the logical-mathematical paradigm of computer science. The results of three psychological experiments point to differences between the dominant paradigm and the subjects "intuitive" way of understanding interactive computer behavior, which shows…

Two studies were conducted to demonstrate the importance of subordinates' perceptions of superiors' intentions in the feedback process. Study 1 included 49 undergraduates, graduates, or professors; and Study 2 included 220 undergraduates. Results indicate that subordinates make fine distinctions concerning their perceptions of supervisors'…

A total of 308 undergraduates performed 2 word tasks and a gestalt closure task in a study of intuition. Subjects could respond discriminately to coherence they could not identify and were led by this perception to form a hunch or hypothesis. Clues to coherence evidently activate problem-solving networks. (SLD)

Examining the metaphor of the child, or lay adult, as an intuitive scientist results in a theory of the development of scientific thinking centering on progressive differentiation and the coordination of theory and evidence. This metacognitive and strategic development requires thinking about theories and evidence. (SLD)

Sixteen middle school students ranked the lengths of various paths in problem-solving interviews. Every student invoked at least one of four intuitions that originated from their everyday experiences: compression, detour, complexity, and straightness. Students continued to use their inadequate intuitions in the posttest before applying learned…

Presents a joint work of mathematics and science educators that suggests that many responses that literature describes as alternative conceptions are interpreted as if they evolved from a small number of intuitive rules. Demonstrates the explanatory and predictive power of these intuitive rules. (Contains 36 references.) (Author/ASK)

Although the Nobel Prize is associated with a rare, superior degree of intellectually creative achievement, high abilities of Nobel laureates are far from well explained. This paper argues that Nobel laureates' high abilities are determined in part by their extracognitive abilities, that is, specific feelings, preferences, beliefs and intuitive…