Cognition, Thinking & Understanding

The Eureka Effect: The Art and Logic of Breakthrough Thinking

Breakthrough thinking comes as a sudden, seemingly unaccountable moment of inspiration. In this book, David Perkins explores the common logic behind breakthroughs in many fields, historical periods, and evolutionary epochs. Drawing on a rich knowledge of both artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology, he sets forth a uniquely integrative theory of how insights occur. Along the way he offers dozens of often playful puzzles and illustrations that reveal the four key processes behind breakthrough thinking. (Originally published in hardcover under the title Archimedes Bathtub.) ISBN-13: 978-0393322552

Schools Need to Pay More Attention to "Intelligence in the Wild"

Traditional schools usually emphasize the kind of intelligence students need to solve clearly defined problems. By stressing this kind of "laboratory intelligence," schools typically ask students to engage in focused, systematic tasks that have unambiguous goals and a clear choice of answers: learn this list of words and how to spell them, learn who the presidents were. The tasks may be challenging, but they are challenging in a predictable way. The attention paid to standards and assessments often works to increase the emphasis on this laboratory intelligence.

Intelligence in the Wild: A Dispositional View of Intellectual Traits

Most accounts of intelligence are "abilities-centric." They aim to explain intelligent behavior in terms of IQ or other measures of intellectual aptitude. However, several investigators have proposed that intelligent behavior in the wild--in everyday circumstances in which carefully framed tests do not tell people exactly what intellectual task to attempt--depends in considerable part on thinking dispositions. Definitionally, dispositions concern not what abilities people have, but how people are disposed to use those abilities. Everyday language includes a number of dispositional terms such as curiosity, open-mindedness, and skepticism. We review several dispositional constructs that researchers have investigated, sometimes under the label dispositions. The findings in trend show that dispositions are stable traits that help to explain intellectual performance over and above measures of intellectual aptitude. It is argued that a dispositional view of intelligence is warranted, and that it is an important area for continued research.

Why Teach Habits of Mind

Why teach habits of mind?

Challenging Educational Assumptions: lessons from an Italian-American collaboration

Abstract: In this paper, the authors argue that in order to create a curriculum of the future, we need to re-evaluate at least four key assumptions about teaching and learning that have guided educational decisions in the past...