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Education and Learning to Think (1987) / Chapter Skim
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THINKING IN THE CURRICULUM
Pages 34-39

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From page 34...
... American pressures for standardized testing, especially at the elementary and secondary school levels, make it difficult for curriculum reforms that do not produce test score gains to survive. But most current tests favor students who have acquired Tots of factual knowledge and do little to assess either the coherence and utility of that knowledge or the students' ability to use it to reason, solve problems, and the like.
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From page 35...
... Embedding Thinking Skille m Academic Disciplines In this view, prudent educational practice should seek to embed efforts to teach cognitive skills into one or another preferably all~f the traclitional school disciplines, and it should do this ret gardless of what may also be done in the way of special courses in thinking or learning skills. This disciplin~embedded approach has several advantages.
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From page 36...
... Second, embedding higher order skill training within school disciplines provides criteria for what constitutes good thinking and reasoning within the disciplinary tradition. Each discipline has character~stic ways of reasoning, and a complete higher order education would seek to expose students to all of these.
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From page 37...
... Thus far the research has shown mainly how very weak readers can be brought up to at least average performance levels. It ~ important to engage these students in meaning construction activities based on text in settings that incorporate modeling of good performance, lots of feedback, and opportunities to do small bits of the task in the context of seeing the whole job accomplished.
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From page 38...
... Although the approaches being tried are extremely varied, most reflect a general point of view similar to the one underlying the successful approaches to teaching reading as a higher order skill. They treat writing as an intentional process, one in which the writer manages a variety of mental resources-linguistic knowledge, topical knowledge, knowIedge of rhetorical forms, processes of attention and judgment to construct a message that will have a desired impact on a reader.
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From page 39...
... This has the effect of making it difficult for students to use their informal and intuitive knowledge of mathematical concepts to support school mathematics learning and to advance their mathematical competence. As we noted earlier, good evidence suggests that much school mathematics learning proceeds as a matter of memorizing rules for formal symbol manipulation without much understanding of why the rules work as they do or what the symbols stand for.
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Key Terms

  • order skills
  • order skill
  • mathematics learning
  • reasoning courses
  • empirical evidence

  • enabling disciplines
  • particular approach
  • informal logic
  • thinking skills
  • performance levels

  • skill training
  • school mathematics
  • school disciplines
  • process skills
  • average performance

  • order thinking
  • special courses
  • topical knowledge
  • treat writing
  • traclitional school

  • order approach
  • disciplinary tradition
  • factual knowledge
  • amounts mainly
  • incorporating reasoning

  • extensive reasoning
  • transfer proves
  • knowledge testings
  • directly taught
  • directly addressed


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