This research project was initiated to examine the vocabulary load contained in word problems appearing in basal mathematics textbooks through a study of word frequency. Five leading basal mathematics series were used. Every word, phrase or sentence that resulted in computation was included. A total of 476,674 words were identified. Information…

These materials were developed in response to the Utah State Board of Education's new high school graduation requirements, particularly as they relate to the identification, teaching, and assessment of certain basic functional competencies. The document has been compiled as a guide and aid to mathematics teachers. Thirty competencies have been…

This report describes the cognitive procedures which a group of Australian stipendiary utilize in court to make decisions. The study was based on an assumption that magistrates represent a group of professionals whose work involves making decisions of human significance, and on an assumption that the magistrates' own perceptions of their ways of…

The manual considers practical issues involved in building and maintaining the effectiveness of school based support teams, interdisciplinary problem solving groups designed to respond to staff needs through crisis intervention, short or long term consultation, and continuous support. Separate sections address the following topics (sample…

These materials are the handouts for school administrators participating in RUPS (Research Utilizing Problem Solving) workshops. The purposes of the workshops are to develop skills for improving schools and to increase teamwork skills. The handouts correspond to the 16 subsets that make up the five-day workshop: (1) orientation; (2) identifying…

The "impulsive responder" is a learner who avoids or eliminates confusing situations. Rather than acknowledging that a given problem solving task is too difficult, the impulsive responder simply perceives a different task--one that he or she has learned to solve. For the teacher there may be many different problems, but for the impulsive…

The Outdoor Research Project of Hutchinson Senior High School in Hutchinson, Kansas, was funded in 1977 to conduct a scientific baseline study of an outdoor education center and a state park. Gifted students used initial limnology tests, fish population studies, and groundcover analyses to produce management recommendations and a computer…

TORTIS is a system of special terminals together with software which is designed to provide programming capability and be accessible for use by very young children. The system is designed to add capabilities in small increments so that the child is never overwhelmed by too much to learn at one time, and maintains a feeling of control over the…

The SPADE theory, which uses linguistic formalisms to model the planning and debugging processes of computer programming, was simultaneously developed and tested in three separate contexts--computer uses in education, automatic programming (a traditional artificial intelligence arena), and protocol analysis (the domain of information processing…

PATN is a design for a machine problem solver which uses an augmented transition network (ATN) to represent planning knowledge. In order to explore PATN's potential as a theory of human problem solving, a linguistic approach to protocol analysis is presented. An interpretation of a protocol is taken to be a parse tree supplemented by semantic and…

Many students are not skilled "thinkers" or "problem solvers." Extensive research has been conducted to describe the mental processes involved in problem solving in the hope of establishing a theoretical basis for training students to become more adept at reasoning. Certain problems become evident, however, when reviewing literature for designing…

This report describes the results of three studies which investigated the use of PLATO to teach problem solving. Subjects were 244 children from kindergarten through third grade. The first study explored the extent to which kindergartners and second graders used the knowledge about which answers were right and which were wrong to develop the…