Education and Learning to Think (1987) / Chapter Skim
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GENERAL REASONING: IMPROVING INTELLIGENCE
GENERAL REASONING: IMPROVING INTELLIGENCE
Pages 15-33
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From page 15... ...
In the social sciences, trained thinkers call upon a wide range of knowledge relevant to a topic to construct proposals for action and to build justifications for those proposals that conform to many of the classical principles of rhetoricad argumentation (doss et al., 1983~. Skilled technicians repairing equipment do not just proceed through routine checklists; instead, they construct Mental modems of complex systems and use these to reason about possible causes of observed breakdowns and potential repairs (e.g., de Kleer and Brown, 1980~.
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From page 16... ...
If such skills exist and if we can find effective ways to teach them, we can imagine an important increase in educational efficiency, for it would seem a relatively narrow instructional effort might produce wide learning results. The search for general learning skills is not a new one.
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From page 17... ...
These skills are sometimes called ~metacognitive skills" (see Brown et al., 1983) because they operate on an individual's own cognitive processes.
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From page 18... ...
Yet such an understanding raises questions about the wisdom of attempting to develop thinking skills outside the context of specific knowledge domains. It suggests that a more promising route may be to teach thinking skills within specific disciplines and perhaps hope for some transfer to other disciplines as relevant knowledge is acquired.
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From page 19... ...
But most are aimed at enhancing general skills or at using a combination of both approaches. Recent programs thus offer an opportunity to update the empirical record concerning the effects of various kinds of training in thinking and reasoning skills.
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From page 20... ...
have proposed a general strategy, which they call "Guided Design, for teaching problem solving and decision making within the context of a variety of subject matters. Guided Design courses have been offered in high schools as well as colleges and in the humanities and social sciences as well as in the physical .
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From page 21... ...
for freshmen for the first six years of the Guided Design program in engineering at West Virginia University. Wales found definite rises in both freshman and four-year grade point averages (GPAs)
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From page 22... ...
The Productive Thinking Program was designed specifically for upper elementary schoolchildren. It, too, teaches a variety of strategies for planning, managing, and monitoring one's own thinking.
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From page 23... ...
Programs anti research studies use different labels to describe a common set of strategies including skimming, using context to figure out words ant] meaning, self-testing to check one's understanding, and generating summaries as one reads.
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From page 24... ...
These include special forms of notetaling intended to highlight relations among different parts of the text's content and to help readers organize their knowledge (Dansereau, 1985; Jones et al., 1985~. Tr some cases, the study skills and reading strategies are embedded in fairly extensive programs that also help students plan their time, manage study activities, control anxiety and mood, and apply delis orate learning strategies in typical academic study situations (e.g., Dansereau, 1985; Weinstein and Underwood, 1985~.
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From page 25... ...
Extensive research supports this prediction. For example, research with retarded individuals shows that it is relatively easy to improve memory task performance by simply instructing people to rehearse or to engage in verbal elaboration and other mnemonic activities.
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From page 26... ...
Furthermore, scores on science and social studies comprehension tests, given in the classroom rather than in the special reciprocal teaching laboratory, also rose significantly. Comparisons with groups of children who engaged in intensive reading practice without the reciprocal teaching support establish the importance of reciprocal teaching in producing these results.
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From page 27... ...
program for high school and college students, Feuerstein's Instrumental Enrichment Program (Feuerstein et al., 1985) , the Venezuela Project Intelligences program (Bolt Beranek and Newman, 1983)
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From page 28... ...
Recognizing this limitation, two of the programs extend their reach substantially beyond the usual testlike tasks. Sternberg's program aims to teach problem-solving techniques drawn from cognitive research, strategies for memorizing and reading, various practical skills (e.g., interviewing and clinical reasoning)
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From page 29... ...
Performance on particular types of items or on A tests as a whole has been shown to improve with training (e.g., Feuerstein et al., 1985; Sternberg, 1986~. However, evidence that improved test scores predict improved performance on problem solving or learning tasks closer to those of school or great lifer is rare (see Lochhead, 1985, for a perspicacious discussion of the difficulties of evaluations that include this kind of transfer criterion)
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From page 30... ...
have developed courses and textbooks in critical thinking that share the concerns of the informal logic movement, although not always the particular analytic vocabulary.
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From page 31... ...
An important debate in the field exactly parallels psychologists' discussions of whether general cognitive skills or specific knowledge is most central to intellectual competence. Most informal logic philosophers believe that general reasoning capacity can be shaped and that it transcends specific knowledge domains (e.g., Ennis, 1980, 1985~.
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From page 32... ...
In these cases, assessments of transfer beyond the course or program itself must be included. Various measures of such transfer can be used, including standardized test scores, subsequent grade point averages, measures of course retention, or advanced program placement.
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From page 33... ...
The correlation was establisher} under particular learning conditions; if those conditions change, the correlation must be reestablished by verifying empirically that the program producing increased SAT scores also produces increased college grades. The same is true for metacognitive skills associated with reading.
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