ABSTRACT
American schools in the latter part of the 20th century face a dramatic shift in their mandate. Not only is the population they serve changing rapidly, but they are now held accountable for higher levels of performance from all, not just from an elite. At the same time, the demands of the workplace require increasingly complex forms of literacy—those that go beyond simple rote acts of reading and calculating. Increasingly, educated graduates need to be able to evaluate critically what they read, express themselves clearly in verbal and written forms, understand scientific and mathematical thinking, and be comfortable with various forms of technology that can serve as tools for thought. Schools are required to foster higher literacy (Resnick & Resnick, 1987) aimed at developing students’ reasoning (Miller, 1988), rather than the low literacies of minimum competence that once served as exit criteria. In addition to the basic enabling competencies (Glaser, 1987) of literacy and numeracy, students are now called on to acquire integrated and usable knowledge rather than sets of compartmentalized facts rarely applied to novel situations. The call is for school graduates to be independent, self-motivated critical thinkers able to take responsibility for their own learning.
