ABSTRACT
Much of today's classroom instruction is directed toward three general types of goals: (a) acquiring the ideas and facts fundamental to disciplines such as science, literature, and history; (b) acquiring basic procedural skills that underlie various curricular disciplines—skills such as reading and using language, and use of problem-solving procedures; and (c) improving higher-order thinking capabilities that enable students to access and apply basic curricular knowledge to the solution of meaningful problems. The chapters in this volume are concerned primarily with goal (c)—improvement of higher-order thinking capabilities. Yet it is readily apparent that the authors represented here believe that an important key to mature thinking is the capacity to access and employ basic information and skills that are taught in the school curriculum. Some argue that development of general thinking capability requires that fundamental curricular knowledge be learned in a form that renders it memorable and useful for whatever problem-solving situations may occur in later courses and throughout life (e.g., Bransford, Franks, Vye, & Sherwood, 1986; Bransford, Sherwood, Vye, & Rieser, 1986; Bransford, Vye, Kinzer, & Risko, chap. 12 in this volume). It seems that educators who wish to promote general reasoning capability must not only teach practical thinking skills, but also must insist that fundamental curricular knowledge is “well constructed”. Otherwise, such knowledge can remain inert and useless, even if it is “learned” (e.g., Bransford, Franks, et al., 1986; Bransford, Sherwood, et al., 1986; Bransford, Franks, & Sherwood, 1987).
