By establishing a conceptual framework and a common language for educators to work together, this volume attempts to answer the challenge facing all teachers -- how can students improve the quality of their thinking? Methods of strengthening the thought process include: helping students learn to monitor their attention and commitments; asking questions that require students to organize, analyze, and integrate information; setting tasks that involve complex processes such as problem solving and research; and modeling and reinforcing fair-mindedness.

This volume is a comprehensive guide to state-of-the-art research on thinking, cognitive instruction, social values, and reform. Cognitive instruction for at-risk students is discussed in great detail along with a thorough examination of the teaching of thinking skills from the viewpoint of educational values and school culture. The issues of thinking, learning, and cognitive instruction are linked to the educational reform movement from numerous perspectives. Specifically, the reader can better anticipate which aspects of research on thinking will conflict with existing paradigms and which aspects of schooling will be most resistant to change.

Since the 1970s the cognitive sciences have offered multidisciplinary ways of understanding the mind and cognition. The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences (MITECS) is a landmark, comprehensive reference work that represents the methodological and theoretical diversity of this changing field. At the core of the encyclopedia are 471 concise entries, from Acquisition and Adaptationism to Wundt and X-bar Theory. Each article, written by a leading researcher in the field, provides an accessible introduction to an important concept in the cognitive sciences, as well as references or further readings. Six extended essays, which collectively serve as a roadmap to the articles, provide overviews of each of six major areas of cognitive science: Philosophy; Psychology; Neurosciences; Computational Intelligence; Linguistics and Language; and Culture, Cognition, and Evolution. For both students and researchers, MITECS will be an indispensable guide to the current state of the cognitive sciences.

First Published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book provides an accessible introduction to the field of cognitive education. It explains the concepts commonly found in the cognitive psychology and cognitive education literatures, theories and models of human thinking and intelligent behavior, and how these have been applied to psychoeducational assessment, instruction, and the adaption of student behavior. The book includes numerous examples to explain the concepts, theories, and applications, and includes supplementary reading lists and study questions.

Hypermedia technology needs a creative approach from the outset in the design of software to facilitate human thinking and learning. This book opens a discussion of the potential of hypermedia and related approaches to provide open exploratory learning environments. The papers in the book are based on contributions to a NATO Advanced Research Workshop held in July1990 and are grouped into six sections: - Semantic networking as cognitive tools, - Expert systems as cognitive tools, - Hypertext as cognitive tools, - Collaborative communication tools, - Microworlds: context-dependent cognitive tools, - Implementing cognitive tools. The book will be valuable for those who design, implement and evaluate learning programs and who seek to escape from rigid tactics like programmed instruction and behavioristic approaches. The book presents principles for exploratory systems that go beyond existing metaphors of instruction and provokes the reader to think in a new way about the cognitive level of human-computer interaction.

This volume documents the growth of a new kind of interdisciplinary teamwork that is evolving among practitioners, researchers, teacher educators, and community partners. Its premise: the design of learning environments and the development of theory must proceed in a mutually supportive fashion. Scientific researchers have learned that a prerequisite to studying the kinds of learning that matter is helping to shoulder the responsibility for ensuring that these forms of learning occur. To support and study learning, researchers are increasingly making major and long-term investments in the design and maintenance of contexts for learning. Practitioners are assuming new roles as well, reflecting an increasing awareness of the need to move beyond skillful doing. If developing learning contexts are to be protected within and expanded beyond the systems that surround them, it is necessary to foster professional communities that will support reflection about practice, including the generation and evaluation of rich and flexible environments for student thinking. One consequence of recent reforms is that teachers are increasingly regarding such tasks as central to their professional development. Innovations in Learning: New Environments for Education describes coordinated interaction between educational design on the one hand, and the development of learning theory on the other, through a series of examples. These examples have been chosen because they are continuing, proven programs with evidence of success. Contributors to the volume are researchers and practitioners who have played a role in inventing these programs and have guided their development over a period of years. Rather than choosing illustrations of a pipeline or "application model of research" from research and then to practice, the editors of this volume have selected interventions in which researchers and practitioners work together persistently to forge common understanding. Such activity is necessarily interdisciplinary, often encompassing long spans of time, and is more akin to engineering in the field than to laboratory science. The common themes that emerge from this activity -- for example, the role of tools, talk, and community -- belong exclusively neither to theory nor to practice, but to their intersection in commitment to specific contexts of learning and continuing contributions to practice and underlying theory. This volume is organized into three sections that reflect different levels and kinds of learning contexts. Each of these levels has been the focus of recent cognitive and reform applications to learning and schooling. The first offers examples of effective learning in informal settings; the second discusses innovative approaches to schooling at the classroom level; and the third reviews reforms that regard the entire school as the appropriate unit of change.

This state-of-the-art volume details the tools for computer conferencing and collaboration, the learning theories grounding their use, and the preliminary results of this merging of theory building with tool use.

Rev. ed. of: Handbook of adult development and learning / edited by Carol Hoare. 2006.