ABSTRACT
Teaching thinking involves imparting to the learner the mental operations in ways that ensure that the learner masters and transfers the operations. Thinking is seen as based on mental operations that, once internalized, can be applied as instruments, strategies, or tools in problem solving, decision making, and learning. The ability to think in an advanced way, according to Jean Piaget’s conception of cognitive development, involves the capacity to reason in terms of formal operations, which the individual achieves as the last stage of intellectual growth. A technique for analyzing a thinking process is to break it up into discrete elementary operations. With the intentional teaching of thinking comes an awareness of the process and the component operations; consequently, students’ thinking processes, not just products, are subject to reproduction, evaluation, and guided improvement. The project “Learning to Think” was based on the methodology of the cognitive research trust thinking program developed by Edward de Bono.
